“I myself know,” declares a Belgian witness,[205] “that the Germans fired on one another on August 25th. On that day, at about 8.0 p.m., I was in the Rue de Bruxelles at Louvain. I was hidden in a house. There was one party of German soldiers at one end of the street firing on another party at the other end. I could see that this happened myself. On the next day I spoke to a German soldier called Hermann Otto—he was a private in a Bavarian regiment. He told me that he himself was in the Rue de Bruxelles the evening before, and that the two parties firing on one another were Bavarians and Poles, he being among the Bavarians....”
The Poles openly blamed the Bavarians for the error. A wounded Polish Catholic, who was brought in during the night to the Dominican Monastery in the Rue Juste-Lipse, told the monks that “he had been wounded by a German bullet in an exchange of shots between two groups of German soldiers.”[206] On the Thursday following, a wounded Polish soldier was lying in the hospital of the Sisters of Mary at Wesemael, and, seeing German troops patrolling the road between Wesemael and Louvain, exclaimed to one of the nuns: “These drunken pigs fired on us.”[207]
The casualties inflicted by the Germans on each other do not, however, appear to have been heavy. One German witness[208] saw “two dead transport horses and several dead soldiers” lying in the Place du Peuple. Another[209] saw a soldier lying near the Juste-Lipse Monument who had been killed by a shot through the mouth. But most express astonishment at the lightness of the losses caused by so heavy a fire. “It is really a miracle,” said a German military doctor to a Belgian Professor in the course of the night,[210] “that not one soldier has been wounded by this violent fusillade.”—“A murderous fire,” states the surgeon of the Second Neuss Landsturm Battalion,[211] “was directed against us from Rue de la Station, No. 120. The fact that we or some of us were not killed I can merely explain by the fact that we were going along the same side of the street from which the shots were fired, and that it was night.”—“A tremendous fire,” states Major von Manteuffel, the Etappen-Kommandant,[212] “was opened from the houses surrounding the Grand’ Place, which was now filled with artillery (one battery), and with transport columns, motor-lorries and tanks of benzine.... I believe there were three men wounded, chiefly in the legs.” General von Boehn, commanding the Ninth Reserve Army Corps, estimates[213] that the total loss, in killed, wounded, and missing, of his General Command Staff, which was stationed in the Place du Peuple, “amounts to 5 officers, 2 officials, 23 men, and 95 horses.”—“I note that the inhabitants fired far too high,” states a N.C.O. of the Landsturm Company drawn up in the Station Square.[214] “That was our good luck, because otherwise, considering the fearful fire which was directed against us from all the houses in the Station Square, most German officers and soldiers would have been killed or seriously wounded.”
Thus the German troops in Louvain seem not merely to have fired on one another, but to have exaggerated hysterically the amount of danger each incurred from the other’s mistake. And the legend grew with time. The deposition last quoted was taken down on September 17th, 1914, less than a month after the event. But when examined again, on November 19th, the same witness deposed that “Many of us were wounded, and some of us even received mortal wounds.... I fully maintain my evidence of September 17th,” he naïvely adds in conclusion.
On the night of August 25th these German soldiers were distraught beyond all restraints of reason and justice. They blindly assumed that it was the civilians, and not their comrades, who had fired, and when they discovered their error they accused the civilians, deliberately, to save their own reputation.
The Director and the Chief Surgeon of the Hôpital St.-Thomas went out into the street after the first fusillade was over. Three soldiers with fixed bayonets rushed at them shouting: “You fired! Die!”—and it was only with difficulty that they persuaded them to spare their lives. When the firing began again a sergeant broke into the hospital shouting: “Who fired here?”—and placed the hospital staff under guard.[215] This was the effect of panic, but there were cases in which the firing was imputed to civilians, and punishment meted out for it, by means of criminal trickery. It was realised that the material evidence would be damning to the German Army. The empty cartridge cases were all German which were picked up in the streets,[216] and it is stated that every bullet extracted from the bodies of wounded German soldiers was found to be of German origin.[217] The Germans, convicted by these proofs, shrank from no fraud which might enable them to transfer the guilt on to the heads of Belgian victims.
“The Germans took the horses out of a Belgian Red Cross car,” states a Belgian witness[218] living in the Station Square, “frightened them so that they ran down the street, and then shot three of them. Two fell quite close to my house. They then took a Belgian artillery helmet and put it on the ground, so as to prepare a mise-en-scène to pretend that the Belgians had been fighting in the street.”
At a late hour of the night a detachment of German soldiers was passing one of the professors’ houses, when a shot rang out, followed by a volley from the soldiers through the windows of the house. The soldiers then broke in and accused the inmates of having fired the first shot. They were mad with fury, and the professor and his family barely escaped with their lives. A sergeant pointed to his boot, with the implication that the shot had struck him there; but a witness in another house actually saw this sergeant fire the original shot himself, and make the same gesture after it to incite his comrades.[219]
A staff-surgeon billeted on a curé in the suburb of Blauwput pretended he had been wounded by civilians when he had really fallen from a wall. On the morning of the 26th the officer in local command arrested fifty-seven men at Blauwput, this curé included, in order to decimate them in reprisal for wounds which the surgeon and two other soldiers had received. The curé was exempted by the lot, when the surgeon came up with a handful of revolver-cartridges which he professed to have discovered in the curé’s house. The officer answered: “Go away. I have searched this house myself,” and the surgeon slunk off. The curé was not added to the victims, but every tenth man was shot all the same.[220]