The check to their arms was avenged on the civil population. “On the arrival of the German troops in the village of Micheroux,” states a Belgian witness (a 12), “during the time when Fort Fléron was holding out, they came to a block of four cottages, and having turned out the inhabitants, set the cottages on fire and burned them. From one of the cottages a woman (mentioned by name) came out with a baby in her arms, and a German soldier snatched it from her and dashed it to the ground, killing it then and there.”[18]
“The position was dangerous,” writes a German in his diary[19] on August 5th, from a picket in front of Fort Fléron. “As suspicious civilians were hovering round, houses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 were cleared, the owners arrested (and shot the next day).... I shoot a civilian with my rifle, at 400 metres, slap through the head....”
3. Liége Forts: A Destroyed Cupola
4. Ans: An Interior
That day the curé of Battice[20]: (who had been kept under arrest in the open since the evening of the 4th) was driven, with the Mayor and one of the communal councillors, under the Belgian fire. On the 6th the German troops again retired on Battice in confusion, and the village was destroyed that afternoon. Shots were fired indiscriminately and the houses set on fire. The first victim was a young man sitting in a café with his fiancée—he fell dead by her side. Three people were taken to the field to which the men of Blégny had been brought, and were shot with the five victims there. On the 7th they shot a workman who had been given a safe-conduct by a German officer to buy bread in a neighbouring village, and was on his way home with his wife. On the 8th they set the fire going again, to burn what still remained. They burned 146 houses and killed 36 people in Battice from first to last.
The town of Herve[21] lies a mile or so beyond Battice on the Fléron road, and was also traversed by the Germans on August 4th. The first to pass were officers in a motor car, and as they crossed the bridge they shot down two young men standing by the roadside—one was badly wounded, the other killed outright. In the evening they sent for the Mayor, accused the inhabitants of having fired on German troops, and threatened to shoot the inhabitants and burn the town to the ground. The Mayor and the curé spent the night going from house to house and warning the people to avoid all grounds of offence—before they had finished there were more shots fired indiscriminately (by the Germans), and more (civilian) wounded and dead. The Mayor and curé were then retained as hostages for the civilians’ good behaviour. On the 6th the first house was burnt; on the 7th five men were shot in cold blood; on the 8th a fresh column of troops arrived from Aix-la-Chapelle, and these were the destroyers of Herve. “They fired indiscriminately in all quarters of the town,” says an eye-witness (a 2), “and in the Rue de la Station they shot Madame Hendrickx, hitting her at close range, although she had a crucifix in her hand—begging for mercy.” All through the 8th the shooting and burning went on, and on the 9th the fires were kindled again. “The Germans gave themselves up to pillage and loaded motor cars with everything of value they could find.” They burned and pillaged consecutively for ten days, and on the 19th and 20th fresh regiments arrived and carried on the work. Two hundred and seventy-nine houses were destroyed at Herve altogether, and 44 people killed. “On the road to Herve everything is burnt,” writes a German soldier (Reply p. 127) who passed when all was over. “At Herve, the same. Everything is burnt except a convent—everywhere corpses carbonised into an indistinguishable mass. (There are about a hundred, all civilians, and children among the number.) I only saw three people alive in the village—an old man, a sister of charity, and a girl.” The Belgian witness quoted above (a 2) records that “the German staff officers staying in his hotel told his wife that the reason why they had so treated Herve was because the inhabitants of the town would not petition for a passage for the Germans at Fléron.”
In the villages between Herve and Fort Fléron the slaughter and devastation were, if possible, more complete. At la Bouxhe-Melen[22] there were two massacres—one on Aug. 5th and another on the 8th. In the second the people were shot down in a field en masse, and 129 were murdered altogether, as well as about 40 people herded in from the farms and hamlets of the neighbourhood. Sixty houses in la Bouxhe-Melen were destroyed. In the commune of Soumagne,[23] on a branch road to the south, the Germans killed 165 civilians and burned 104 houses down. When they entered Soumagne on Aug. 5th, they killed indiscriminately in the streets. “They broke the windows and broke the door,” writes a witness (a 5) who had taken refuge in a cellar. “My mother went out of the cellar door.... Then I heard a shot and my mother fell back into the cellar. She was killed.” This indiscriminate killing was followed up the same afternoon by the massacre of 69 civilians in a field called the Fonds Leroy. “The soldiers fired a volley and killed many, and then fired twice more. Then they went through the ranks and bayonetted everyone still living. I saw many bayonetted in this way” (a 4). One boy was shot and bayonetted in four places, and lay several days among the dead, keeping himself alive on weeds and grass. This boy survived. In another field 18 were massacred in one batch, in another 19. “I saw about 20 dead bodies lying here and there along the road,” writes one of the witnesses (a 4). “One of them was that of a little girl aged 13. The rest were men, and most of them had had their heads bashed in.”—“I saw 56 corpses of civilians in a meadow,” deposes another. “Some had been killed by bayonet thrusts and others by rifle shots. In the heaps of corpses above mentioned was that of the son of the Burgomaster. His throat had been cut from ear to ear and his tongue had been pulled out and cut off.”
In the hamlet of Fécher the whole population—about 1,000 women, children and men—was penned into the church on Aug. 5th, and next morning the men (412 of them) were herded off as a living screen for the German troops advancing between the forts (the first man to come out of the church being wantonly shot down as an example to the rest). The 411 were driven by bye-roads to the Chartreuse Monastery, above the Meuse, overlooking the bridge into the city of Liége, and on the 7th they were planted as hostages on the bridge while the Germans marched across. They were held there without food or shelter or relief for a hundred hours. At Micheroux[24] 9 people were killed and 17 houses destroyed. These villages were all outside the eastern line of forts, but the places inside the line, between the forts and Liége, were devastated to an equal degree. At Fléron[25] 15 civilians were killed and 152 houses destroyed.[26] At Retinnes[27] 41 civilians were killed and 118 houses destroyed.[26] At Queue du Bois[28] 11 civilians were killed and 35 houses destroyed. At Evegnée 2 civilians were killed and 5 houses destroyed. At Cerexhe[29] 4 women and children were burnt alive in a house, and 2 houses destroyed. At Bellaire[30] 4 people were killed and 15 houses destroyed. At Jupille[31] 8 people were killed and 1 house destroyed. These villages were saved none of the horrors of war by the surrender of the forts.