a village, states that his troop halted outside a bakery just inside the village.  It was a private house where baking was done, “not like our bakeries here.”  Two or three women were standing at the door.  The women motioned them to come into the house, as did also three civilian Frenchmen who were there.  They took them into a garden at the back of the house.  At the end of the garden was the bakery.  They saw two old men between 60 and 70 years of age and one old woman lying close to each other in the garden.  All three had the scalps cut right through and the brains were hanging out.  They were still bleeding.  Apparently they had only just been killed.  The three French civilians belonged to this same house.  One of them spoke a few words of English.  He gave them to understand that these three had been killed by the Germans because they had refused to bake bread for them.

Another witness states that two German soldiers took hold of a young civilian named D. and bound his hands behind his back, and struck him in the face with their fists.  They then tied his hands in front and fastened the cord to the tail of the horse.  The horse dragged him for about fifty yards, and then the Germans loosened his hands and left him.  The whole of his face was cut and torn, and his arms and legs were bruised.  On the following day one of his sisters, whose husband was a soldier, came to their house with her four children.  His brother, who was also married and who lived in a village near Valenciennes, went to fetch the bread for his sister.  On the way back to their house he met a patrol of Uhlans, who took him to the market place at Valenciennes, and then shot him.  About twelve other civilians were also shot in the market place.  The Uhlans then burned nineteen houses in the village, and afterward burned the corpses of the civilians, including that of his brother.  His father and his uncle afterward went to see the dead body of his brother, but the German soldiers refused to allow them to pass.

A lance corporal in the Rifles, who was on patrol duty with five privates during the retirement of the Germans after the Marne, states that they entered a house in a small village and took ten Uhlans prisoners, and then searched the house and found two women and two children.  One was dead, but the body not yet cold.  The left arm had been cut off just below the elbow.  The floor was covered with blood.  The woman’s clothing was disarranged.  The other woman was alive but unconscious.  Her right leg had been cut off above the knee.  There were two little children, a boy about 4 or 5 and a girl of about 6 or 7.  The boy’s left hand was cut off at the wrist and the girl’s right hand at the same place.  They were both quite dead.  The same witness states that he saw several women and children lying dead in various other places, but says he could not say whether this might not have been accidentally caused in legitimate fighting.

The evidence before us proves that in the parts of France referred to murder of unoffending civilians and other acts of cruelty, including aggravated cases of rape, carried out under threat of death, and sometimes actually followed by murder of the victim, were committed by some of the German troops.