5
A few days after the events which I have narrated, on the 23rd of August, 1914, Dinant became the scene of wholesale massacres which involved exactly six hundred and six victims, including eleven children under five years old, twenty-eight of ages between ten and fifteen and seventy-one women.
Nothing can give an idea of the horror and infamy of these massacres, which form one of the most disgraceful and terrible pages in the long and monstrous history of Teuton shame. But it is not my purpose to speak of this for the moment. There would be too much to tell. I wish to-day only to separate from the mass an episode in which the hero of Dinant-la-Wallone is worthy of a place beside his two brethren of Aerschot in Flanders.
Just outside Dinant, near the famous Roche à Bayard, the legendary glory of the fair and smiling little township, the Germans occupied the right bank of the Meuse and were beginning to build a bridge of boats. The French, hidden in the bushes and the windings of the left bank, were firing on the engineers. Their fire was not very well-sustained; and the Germans, without the least justification, drew the conclusion that it was due to francs-tireurs, who, for that matter, throughout this Belgian campaign, never existed except in their imagination. At that moment, eighty hostages, taken from among the inhabitants of Dinant, were collected and kept in sight at the foot of the rock. The German officer sent one of them, M. Bourdon, a clerk attached to the law-courts, to the left bank, to inform the enemy that, if the firing continued, all the hostages would be instantly shot. M. Bourdon crossed the Meuse, fulfilled his mission and pluckily returned to reconstitute himself a prisoner. He assured the officer that he had convinced himself that there were no francs-tireurs and that only French soldiers of the regular army were taking part in the defence of the other bank. A few more bullets fell; and the officer caused the eighty hostages to be shot, beginning, that he might be punished as he deserved for his heroic faithfulness to his pledged word, with the poor clerk, his wife, his daughter and his two sons, one of whom was a mere child of fifteen.
WASTED BEAUTIES