Poland and Serbia
Such acts were outdone at the other end of Europe, in the Eastern theatre of war. In Poland, at Khabbeck, the Austrians mutilated two women on the pretext that civilians were helping the movements of the Russian troops.
In the Podogorsky Arrondissement the Serbian troops found in the village of Jabonka the corpses of a young girl of about ten years old and of three old women, all three alike mutilated. Finally, Professor Reiss, of the University of Lausanne, who visited the Serbian territories invaded by the Austro-Hungarians, confirmed the authenticity of the mutilations in which the invader of Serbia had indulged.
“At Bastave” (he reports in his letter to the Temps of 22nd November) “nearly everybody took to flight when it was known that the Austrians were approaching. The two infirm women named Soldatovich, aged seventy-two and seventy-eight years, did not want to leave their house. They thought that even the most cruel men would do nothing to invalided old women. But when the peasants came back after the Austrians had gone, they found that the two poor old women had been violated, stabbed with bayonet thrusts, their noses, ears and breasts cut. Besides, mutilation was quite a usual practice amongst the murderers of the Austro-Hungarian army.”
These barbarous acts, when they did not cause the victim’s death, sometimes brought on insanity. This was the case, amongst other instances, with several women of Louvain, who were escorted by a detachment of the 162nd German infantry regiment to the riding-school of the town, and having, from want of room, passed a whole night standing, endured such terrible sufferings that they lost their reason.