ALLEGED GERMAN OUTRAGES

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to burn the houses in the Rue Marie Therese and the Place de la
Station, and they put up a barricade across the road with three
machine guns pointing towards the direction of Boulevard de Diest.
Shortly after 10 shots very numerous were heard coming from all
quarters, but not as if there was fighting. At 12 o'clock midnight
my friends (names given) knocked at my door, telling me that the
Germans were destroying the town that it was all on fire and that
the fighting had been amongst the Germans themselves by mistake.
I have very good cellars in my house and I invited many of my
neighbours to come and take shelter. They had to climb over
the walls of the gardens and by 1 o'clock on the afternoon of
August 27th there were about 36 of us altogether. I could see
German soldiers in the bedroom of a lady who was taking refuge
with us. The Germans picked up the little toilet ornaments and
silver things and put them in their pocket and threw others down
or out of the window, and I could see the Germans examining the
value of them before taking or throwing them away. At least six
or eight of my friends saw this going on and afterwards the Germans
set fire to the houses from top to bottom at the same time. They
did this in bodies of about 15. Then they passed to the next
house, and so on, doing just the same thing. When we saw that
the Germans had entered the house of our neighbour, we decided
to escape over the garden wails. When we were crossing a particularly
high wall my wife was on the top of the wall and I was helping
her to get down when a party of 15 Germans came up w r ith rifles and
revolvers. They pointed their weapons at us telling us to stop.
I told them not to shoot my wife, but to shoot me. They did not
shoot. They told us to come down, which we did. My wife did not
follow as quickly as they wished. One of them made a lunge at her
with his bayonet, I seized the blade of the bayonet and stopped
the lunge. The German soldier then tried to stab me in the face
with his bayonet, but I ducked and he hit my hat with his bayonet,
and I only got a scratch on the scalp. I then seized the German's
rifle with my two hands and appealed to a non-commissioned officer
who was present, asking him if the German had orders to kill us.
This man gave some order to the soldiers and they fell back. We
were ordered to put our hands up. They kept hitting us with the
butt ends of their rifles, the women and children as well as the men.
There were 36 of us in the garden. They struck.us on the elbows
because they said our arms were not raised high enough. I was
carrying some parcels containing, amongst other things, jewellery,
and they made me drop my parcels. They knocked the parcels out
of my hands three times, and on the third occasion I was not able
to pick them up again. I had bruises ail over from their maltreatment,
and so had my wife. We were driven in this way through a
burning house to the Place de la Station. There were a number of
prisoners already there. In front of the station entrance there were
the corpses of three civilians killed by rifle fire. The women and
the children were separated. The women were put on one side and
the men on the other. One of the German soldiers pushed my wife
with the butt end of his rifle, so that she was compelled to walk on
the three corpses. Her shoes were full of blood. The men were
drawn up in the square in front of the Place de Diest. The women
and children were confined behind barbed wire in the station yard.
Two or three German officers, one of whom was very big, and another
thin and very young, came and told us many times that we were
going to be shot. They came not only to the group of men but to
the women and children also. Other prisoners were continually being
brought in from all parts of the town and were brutally ill-treated.
One young woman on passing by the three corpses had a fit of