Tortured Women
A humane reader cannot repress a tremor as he learns the story of the tortures inflicted on women by the Germans on several occasions. We should have spared our readers these stories, were it not necessary to pay special attention to them for the purpose of showing how far German barbarism can go.
At Dompierre-aux-Bois, after the bombardment which we have described, the Germans did not want to allow the people shut up in a church which they were bombarding even to go to look for water to tend the wounded. Women were compelled to wait without help, wounded, bruised, mutilated under the eyes of their parents, who were powerless to help them during a time of agony which for some lasted up to twenty-four and thirty-six hours. When they were dead, the Germans forced the men to dig a grave near the cemetery and to bury them in it. One of them found that in this way he was forced to bury without a coffin his wife, her mother and her sisters.
At Révigny the French Commission of Inquiry notes the case of a woman who was found killed in a cellar, with her breast and right arm cut off. Her little son, aged eleven years, also had a foot cut off.
M. Bonne, the senior curate of Étain, declares in his report that a woman of Audun-le-Roman, who was suckling her child, was tortured for refusing to give the enemy food. They mangled her abdomen and killed her child.
At Sempst, in Belgium, a woman was bayoneted, covered with petrol, and thrown into the flames. The fact is noted in the second report of the Belgian Commission of Inquiry. M. Pierre Nothomb relates the following facts: “On coming to Averbode, on the 20th August, the Germans saw a woman, who—seized with fear—concealed herself in a ditch. They killed her with lance-thrusts. An hour’s journey from there, at Schaffen, they disembowelled a young girl of twenty years. Peasants from the outskirts of Louvain went to Antwerp, on the 12th September, and told that at Wilzele the Germans wanted to burn alive Mme. Van Kriegelinen and her eleven children. The woman and eight children were burnt. We saw the corpses of the mother and her children, and were present at the execution.” The volunteer gunner de R⸺ unpinned from the ground the bodies of a woman and her child, who were fastened to the ground by bayonets. Asked about what had passed at Boortmeerbeck, Dr. V⸺ of Malines deposed: “Mme. Van Rollegem came to the hospital of Malines on the 22nd August. On Thursday the 20th, as she was fleeing from Boortmeerbeck with her husband, she was shot twice in the leg. She threw herself into the ditch to take shelter. Some minutes later the Germans who had fired on her came up to her again and made horrible wounds in her left thigh and left forearm. She remained like that without help until Saturday evening. The wounds were gangrened and worms were swarming over them.”
During the night of the 23rd to 24th August soldiers knocked violently at the door of the Château of Canne, owned by M. Poswick. Mme. Poswick opened the door; she was forthwith bludgeoned with the butt-ends of rifles. On Sunday, the 30th of August, a patrol of hussars, as a Lord’s day recreation, amused themselves by firing, on the Brussels road at Malines, at Catherine Van Kerchove, a woman of seventy-four years of age, at every part of her they could hit without killing her. A rifle shot carried off her right hand, another gashed her cheek. At Battice, before burning houses, the Germans made women go into them and shut them up there.
Sometimes German barbarism spent itself in putting people in captivity. At Dinant many women were kept shut up in the Abbaye des Prémontrés. Here they remained seated on the floor without food. Four of them were confined under these dreadful conditions (see [Chap. XIII]).