Golden Lads | Page 9

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 made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then, catching sight of Leopold, they struck him with the butts of their guns and forced him to pass through the fire. Then, taking him outside, they struck him to the ground and gave him a blow over the head with a gunstock and a cut of the bayonet, which pierced his thigh all the way through.
"In spite of my wound," said he, "they made me pass between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back in order to make me march. There were seventeen or eighteen persons with me. They placed us in front of their lines and menaced us with their revolvers, crying out that they will make us pay for the losses