Children tortured by Germans
At Hofstade, said Pierre Nothomb, a lad of less than fifteen years was found with hands crossed behind his back and his body pierced with bayonet thrusts. At Pin, near Izel, two young boys saw the Uhlans coming; the latter took them as they passed, and made them run, with hands bound, between their galloping horses. Their dead bodies were found an hour afterwards in a ditch; as an eye-witness said, their knees were “literally worn out”; one had his throat cut and his breast laid open; each had a bullet in his head. At Schaffen a lad was bound to a shutter, sprinkled with petrol, and burnt alive. The soldiers who marched on Antwerp took a butcher’s cleaver at Sempst; they seized a little servant boy, cut off his legs, then his head, and roasted him in a burning house. At Lebbeke-les-Termonde, Frans Mertens and his comrades, Van Dooren, Dekinder, Stobbelaer and Wryer, were bound arm to arm; their eyes were gouged out with a pointed weapon, then they were killed by rifle shots.
In France, at Dompierre-aux-Bois, the children who were wounded in the bombardment of the church found themselves left to their agony, without attendance and without food. The dead bodies of two children who had been killed by bayonet thrusts were found at Neuville-en-Artois. At Vingras a little girl of eight years was thrust into the flames with her parents, whose farmhouse had been set on fire. At Sommeilles the dead body of a child of eleven was found with its foot cut off. At Triaucourt the wretches burnt a two-year-old child.
In Serbia similar outrages were committed. M. Reiss, Professor of Lausanne University, has proved that children of two months old were massacred. “I found children in common ditches who were not more than two or three years old. Amongst the 109 hostages of Lechnitza who were shot in front of a ditch which had previously been dug out, and which was not less than twenty metres long, there were some children of not more than eight years old.”