Golden Lads | Page 9

medical man, and I expressed doubt as to the truth of the stories of

atrocity. I said I had combatted such stories often in America. In reply,
he asked me to visit a house which had been made over into an
obstetrical hospital for Belgian nuns. I went with him to the hospital.
Here over a hundred nuns had been and were being cared for."
On a later Sunday in September I visited the Municipal Hospital of
Ghent. In Salle (Hall) 17, I met and talked with Martha Tas, a peasant
girl of St. Gilles (near Termonde). As she was escaping by train from
the district, and when she was between Alost and Audeghem, she told
me that German soldiers aimed rifle fire at the train of peasants. She
was wounded by a bullet in the thigh. My companion on this visit was
William R. Renton, at one time a resident of Andover, Massachusetts.
His present address is the Coventry Ordnance Works, Coventry.
A friend of mine has been lieutenant in a battery of 75's stationed near
Pervyse. His summer home is a little distance out from Liège. His wife,
sister-in-law, and his three children were in the house when the
Germans came. Peasants, driven from their village, hid in the cellar.
His sister took one child and hid in a closet. His wife took the
two-year-old baby and the older child and hid in another closet. The
troops entered the house, looted it and set it on fire. As they left they
fired into the cellar. The mother rushed from her hiding place, went to
her desk and found that her money and the family jewels, one a gift
from the husband's family and handed down generation by generation,
had been stolen. With the sister, the baby in arms, the two other
children and the peasants, she ran out of the garden. They were fired on.
They hid in a wood. Then, for two days, they walked. The raw potatoes
which they gathered by the way were unfit for the little one. Without
money, and ill and weakened, they reached Holland. This lady is in a
safe place now, and her testimony in person is available.
[Illustration: THE GREEN PASS, USED ONLY BY SOLDIERS AND
OFFICERS OF THE BELGIAN ARMY.
It gives passage to the trenches at any hour. The writer, by holding this,
and working under the Prime Minister's son, became stretcher-bearer in
the Belgian Army.]

The apologists of the widespread reign of frightfulness say that war is
always "like that," that individual drunken soldiers have always broken
loose and committed terrible acts. This defense does not meet the facts.
It meets neither the official orders, nor the cold method, nor the
immense number of proved murders. The German policy was ordered
from the top. It was carried out by officers and men systematically,
under discipline. The German War Book, issued by the General Staff,
and used by officers, cleverly justifies these acts. They are recorded by
the German soldiers themselves in their diaries, of which photographic
reproductions are obtainable in any large library. The diaries were
found on the persons of dead and wounded Germans. The name of the
man and his company are given.
On Sunday, September 27, I was present at the battle of Alost, where
peasants came running into our lines from the German side of the canal.
In spite of shell, shrapnel, rifle, and machine fire, these peasants
crossed to us. The reason they had for running into fire was that the
Germans were torturing their neighbors with the bayonet. One peasant,
on the other side of the canal, hurried toward us under the fire, with a
little girl on his right shoulder.
On Tuesday, September 29, I visited Wetteren Hospital. I went in
company with the Prince L. de Croy, the Due D'Ursel, a senator; the
Count de Briey, Intendant de la Liste Civile du Roy, and the Count
Retz la Barre (all of the Garde du General de Wette, Divisions de
Cavalerie). One at least of these gentlemen is as well and as favorably
known in this country as in his own. I took a young linguist, who was
kind enough to act as secretary for me. In the hospital I found eleven
peasants with bayonet wounds upon them--men, women and a
child--who had been marched in front of the Germans at Alost as a
cover for the troops, and cut with bayonets when they tried to dodge the
firing. A priest was ministering to them, bed by bed. Sisters were in
attendance. The priest led us to the cot of one of the men. On Sunday
morning, September 27, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of No. 90,
Hovenier-Straat, Alost, was hiding in the house with his sister, in the
cellar. The Germans