Again another:  “Dinant. We have been firing on everyone who showed himself, or on those thrown out of the houses, men or women.  The bodies lie in the streets, in heaps a yard deep.”

A Saxon officer writes:  “My company is at Bouvignes.  Our men behave like vandals:  everything is upset; the sight of the slaughtered inhabitants defies all description; not a house is left standing.  We have dragged out of every corner all survivors, one after another, men, women, and children, found in a burning cloister, and have shot them ‘en masse.’”

The following depositions on the massacres at Nomeny are made by prisoners, one a Bavarian officer in the Reserve, the other a private in the same regiment.  The lieutenant says:  “I gathered the impression that it was impossible for the officers at Nomeny to prevent such acts.  As far as I can judge, the crimes committed there, which horrified all the soldiers who were at Nomeny later on, must be put down to the acts of unnatural brutes.”  The soldier says, “At five o’clock regimental orders were received to kill every male inhabitant of Nomeny, and to raze everything to the ground; we forced our way into the houses.”  Here is a more detailed account of a massacre near Blamont.  “All the villagers fled:  it was terrible; their beards thick with blood, and what faces!  They were dreadful to look at.  The dead were all buried, numbering sixty.  Among them were many old men and women, and one unfortunate woman half confined—­the whole being frightful to look at.  Three children were clasped in each other’s arms, and had died thus.  The Altar and the vaulting of the church were destroyed because there was a telephone[11] communicating with the enemy.  This morning, 2nd September, all the survivors were expelled.  I saw four small boys carrying away on two sticks a cradle containing a baby of five or six months.  All this is dreadful to see.  Blow for blow:  thunder against thunder!  Every thing is given up to pillage.  I also saw a mother with her two children; one had a big wound on the head, and one eye knocked out.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[8] They have decorated the pirates who sank the Lusitania.  They glory in the crime, and have even struck a commemorative medal in its honour.

[9] In this case, and many of the following ones, the reader is requested to note, and remember, the motive for the murders.

[10] This cruel treatment of the Abbe Dergent, priest of Gelrode, near Louvain, is reported by a neutral witness, Father G., a student at Louvain.  The German soldiers accused the Belgian priests of every conceivable crime; the Assistant-Priest of Sainte-Gertrude (Louvain), who was remonstrating with a soldier, received this reply:  “We are Catholics too, but you are pigs and black devils.”  In Belgium about one hundred of the clergy were massacred.  Note further that in this unfortunate country doctors were particularly ill-treated; thirty-seven being shot in the small parishes, while more than one hundred and fifty disappeared altogether from large towns.