In that prison the poor wretches were treated with much greater severity than ordinary prisoners, for they were shut up in cells and had no air.  “By climbing on a chest one might open the window and see a little bit of the landscape.  The ordinary prisoners were allowed to do this but we were forbidden.”  There was not a single chair.  There was the skeleton of an iron bed which was quite useless as there was no mattress.  There were four blankets, and two bundles of straw which very soon crumbled into dust.  “One day a week we had an hour in the courtyard, and there we walked round and round in single file, being forbidden to walk two by two.  There was a guard with fixed bayonets always with us.  The food was absolutely inadequate[21] and we suffered continually from hunger.  There was a certain Croibien who had been slightly wounded at Dinant by a bullet in his arm.  His wound, neglected during the journey, had become septic and in spite of all his sufferings, nothing was done for him.  It was not until after several days that it was decided to take him to the infirmary where his arm was amputated; he died the next day.  Although his father and brothers were interned with him, they were not allowed to see him again, alive or dead.”

M. Tschoffen, public prosecutor at Dinant, the high official who writes these lines, finishes his deposition with these words:  “They had no reason whatever for our arrest, and I do not see any reason that they could have for setting us at liberty.  One fine day they told us that we were going to leave.”

Here is another illustration:  Before the 28th February, 1915, more than 10,000 persons, old men, women, and children, who had been deported from France to Germany, had been repatriated by way of Switzerland.  All those who received them on their return were “alarmed at their ragged condition and weakness,” which was so great that the French Commission of Enquiry received special instructions to question these victims.  They took the evidence of over 300 witnesses in 28 different localities.  To do justice to their case one ought to quote the whole report—­children brutally torn away from their mothers, poor wretches crowded for days together in carriages so tightly packed that they had to stand up, cases of madness occurring among these half-stifled crowds, howling with hunger.  But we must confine our quotations to a few items of “Kultur.”  “While the men of Combres set out for Germany, the women and children were shut up in the village church.  They were kept there for a month, and passed their nights seated in the pews.  Dysentery and croup raged among them.  The women were allowed to carry excrement only just outside the church into the churchyard.”—­“At least four of the prisoners were massacred because they could not keep up with, the column, being completely exhausted.”—­“Fortin, aged 65, and infirm, could not go any further.  They tied a rope to him, and two horsemen held the ends so that he had to keep the pace of the horses.  As he kept falling down at every moment, they made him get up by poking him with their lances.  The poor wretch, covered with blood, prayed them to kill him.”