Outbreak of Atrocities from the Moment the German Army crossed the Frontier.
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Murder, rape, arson and pillage began from the moment when the German Army crossed the frontier. For the first fortnight of the war, the towns and villages near Liège were the chief sufferers.... There is a certain significance in the fact that the outrages round Liège coincide with the unexpected resistance of the Belgian Army in that district, and that the slaughter which reigned from August 19th to the end of the month is contemporaneous with the period when the German Army's need for a quick passage through Belgium at all costs was deemed imperative.
Article 46 of the Second International Peace Conference (Convention concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land), held at the Hague in 1907, reads as follows:—
Family honour and rights, individual life, and private property, as well as religious convictions and worship, must be respected.
Private property may not be confiscated.
Instances from Herve and Melen.
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"On the 4th of August," says one witness, "at Herve" (a village not far from the frontier), "I saw at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, near the station, five Uhlans [German cavalry]; these were the first German troops I had seen. They were followed by a German officer and some soldiers in a motor car. The men in the car called out to a couple of young fellows who were standing about 30 yards away. The young men, being afraid, ran off, and then the Germans fired and killed one of them named D——." The murder of this innocent fugitive civilian was a prelude to the burning and pillage of Herve and of other villages in the neighbourhood, to the indiscriminate shooting of civilians of both sexes, and to the organised military execution of batches of selected males. Thus at Herve some 50 men escaping from the burning houses were seized, taken outside the town and shot. At Melen, a hamlet west of Herve, 40 men were shot. In one household alone the father and mother (names given) were shot, the daughter died after being outraged, and the son was wounded.
The Slaughter of Civilians speedily became a Custom.
The burning of the villages in this neighbourhood, and the wholesale slaughter of civilians, such as occurred at Herve, Micheroux and Soumagne appear to be connected with the exasperation caused by the resistance of Fort Fléron, whose guns barred the main road from Aix-la-Chapelle to Liège. Enraged by the losses which they had sustained, suspicious of the temper of the civilian population, and probably thinking that by exceptional severities at the outset they could cow the spirit of the Belgian nation, the German officers and men speedily accustomed themselves to the slaughter of civilians.