“One day when the Germans were not actually bombarding the town I left my house to go to my mother’s house in High Street.  My husband was with me.  I saw eight German soldiers, and they were drunk.  They were singing and making a lot of noise and dancing about.  As the German soldiers came along the street I saw a small child, whether boy or girl I could not see, come out of a house.  The child was about two years of age.  The child came into the middle of the street so as to be in the way of the soldiers.  The soldiers were walking in twos.  The first line of two passed the child.  One of the second line, the man on the left, stepped aside and drove his bayonet with both hands into the child’s stomach, lifting the child into the air on his bayonet and carrying it away on his bayonet, he and his comrades still singing.  The child screamed when the soldier struck it with his bayonet but not afterward.”

These, no doubt, were for the most part the acts of drunken soldiers, but an incident has been recorded which discloses the fact that even sober and highly placed officers were not always disposed to place a high value on child life.  Thus the General, wishing to be conducted to the Town Hall at Lebbeke, remarked in French to his guide, who was accompanied by a small boy:  “If you do not show me the right way I will shoot you and your boy.”  There was no need to carry the threat into execution, but that the threat should have been made is significant.

We cannot tell whether these acts of cruelty to children were part of the scheme for inducing submission by inspiring terror.  In Louvain, where the system of terrorizing was carried to the furthest limit, outrages on children were uncommon.  The same, however, cannot be said of some of the smaller villages which were subjected to the system.  In Hofstade and Sempst, in Haecht, Rotselaer, and Wespelaer, many children were murdered.  Nor can it be said of the village of Tamines, where three small children (whose names are given by an eye witness of the crime) were slaughtered on the green for no apparent motive.  It is difficult to imagine the motives which may have prompted such acts.  Whether or no Belgian civilians fired on German soldiers, young children at any rate did not fire.  The number and character of these murders constitute the most distressing feature connected with the conduct of the war so far as it is revealed in the depositions submitted to the committee.

(c) The Use of Civilians as Screens.

We have before us a considerable body of evidence with reference to the practice of the Germans of using civilians and sometimes military prisoners as screens from behind which they could fire upon the Belgian troops, in the hope that the Belgians would not return the fire for fear of killing or wounding their own fellow-countrymen.