Thus, when he heard the shots, Captain Karge leapt to his conclusions. “The regularity of the volleys gave me the impression that the affair was well organised and possibly under military command.” It never occurred to him that they might be German volleys commanded by German officers as apprehensive as himself. “Everywhere, apparently,” he proceeds, “the firing came, not from the windows, but from roof-openings or prepared loopholes in the attics of the houses.” But if not from the windows, why not from the square, which was crowded with German soldiers, when a moment afterwards (admittedly) these very soldiers were firing furiously? “This” (assumed direction from which the firing came) “is the explanation of the smallness of the damage done by the shots to men and animals,” and, in fact, the only victim the Germans claim is Colonel Stenger, the Brigadier. After the worst firing was over and the troops were getting under control, Colonel Stenger was found by his aide-de-camp (A 2), who had come up to his room to make a report, lying wounded on the floor and on the point of death. Captain Folz (A 5) records that “the Regimental Surgeon of the Infantry Regiment No. 140, who made a post-mortem examination of the body in his presence on the following day, found in the aperture of the breast wound a deformed leaden bullet, which had been shattered by contact with a hard object.” It remains to prove that the bullet was not German. The German White Book does not include any report from the examining surgeon himself.
Meanwhile, the town and people of Aerschot were given over to destruction. “I now took some soldiers,” proceeds Captain Karge, “and went with them towards the house from which the shooting”—in Captain Karge’s belief—“had first come.... I ordered the doors and windows of the ground floor, which were securely locked, to be broken in. Thereupon I pushed into the house with the others, and using a fairly large quantity of turpentine, which was found in a can of about 20 litres capacity, and which I had poured out partly on the first storey and then down the stairs and on the ground floor, succeeded in setting the house on fire in a very short time. Further, I had ordered the men not taking part in this to guard the entrances of the house and arrest all male persons escaping from it. When I left the burning house several civilians, including a young priest, had been arrested from the adjoining houses. I had these brought to the square, where in the meantime my company of military police had collected.
“I then ... took command of all prisoners, among whom I set free the women, boys and girls. I was ordered by a staff officer to shoot the prisoners. Then I ordered my police ... to escort the prisoners and take them out of the town. Here, at the exit, a house was burning, and by the light of it I had the culprits—88 in number, after I had separated out three cripples—shot....”
11. Haelen
12. Aerschot
These 88 victims were only a preliminary batch. The whole population of Aerschot was being hunted out of the houses by the German troops and driven together into the square. They were driven along with brutal violence. “One of the Germans thrust at me with his bayonet,” states one woman (c 9), “which passed through my skirt and behind my knees. I was too frightened to notice much.”—“When we got into the street,” states another (c 10), “other German soldiers fired at us. I was carrying a child in my arms, and a bullet passed through my left hand and my child’s left arm. The child was also hit on the fundament.... In the hospital, on Aug. 22nd, I saw three women die of wounds.”—“In the ambulance at the Institut Damien,” reports the monk quoted above, “we nursed four women, several civilians and some children. A one-year-old child had received a bayonet wound in its thigh while its mother was carrying it in her arms. Several civilians had burns on their bodies and bullet wounds as well. They told us how the soldiers set fire to the houses and fired on the suffocating inhabitants when they tried to escape.”
As elsewhere, the incendiarism was systematic. “They used a special apparatus, something like a big rifle, for throwing naphtha or some similar inflammable substance” (c 19).—“I was taken to the officer in command,” states a professor (c 14). “I found him personally assisting in setting fire to a house. He and his men were lighting matches and setting them to the curtains.”—“We saw a whole street burning, in which I possessed two houses,” deposes a native of Aerschot, who was being driven towards the square. “We heard children and beasts crying in the flames” (c 2). A civilian went out into the street to see if his mother was in a burning house. He was shot down by Germans at a distance of 18 yards (c 5). Another householder (R. No. 5) threw his child out of the first-floor window of his burning house, jumped out himself, and broke both his legs. His wife was burnt alive. “The Germans with their rifles prevented anyone going to help this man, and he had to drag himself along with his legs broken as best he could” (c 19).—“The whole upper part of my house caught fire,” declares another (R. No. 13), “when there were a dozen people in it. The Germans had blocked the street door to prevent them coming out. They tried in vain to reach the neighbouring roofs.... The Germans were firing on everyone in the streets....”
By this time the Germans were mostly drunk (c9) and lost to all reason or shame. Two men and a boy stepped out of the door of a public-house in which they had taken refuge with others. “As soon as we got outside we saw the flash of rifles and heard the report.... We came in as quickly as we could and shut the door. The German soldiers entered. The first man who entered said, ‘You have been shooting,’ and the others kept repeating the same words. They pointed their revolvers at us, and threatened to shoot us if we moved” (c 4).