When they reached the Station Square the men were herded to one side, the women and children to the other. It was done by an officer with a loaded revolver.[270] “We were separated from our families,” states one of the men;[271] “we were knocked about and blows were rained on us from rifle butts; the women and children and the men were isolated from one another....”
The men’s pockets were rifled. Purses, keys, penknives and so on were taken from them.[272] One gentleman’s servant had 7,805 francs taken from his bag, and was given a receipt for 7,000 francs in exchange.[273] This was the preliminary to a “trial,” conducted by Captain Albrecht,[274] a staff officer of the Ninth Reserve Corps. “The soldiers,” states a German tradesman who acted as Captain Albrecht’s interpreter,[275] “brought forward the civilians whom they had seized.... In all about 600 persons may have been brought in, the lives of at least 500 of whom were spared, because no clear proof of their guilt seemed to be established at the trial. These persons were set on one side.... Captain Albrecht followed the course—I imagine, by the command of his superiors—of ordering that those among the men brought forward upon whom either a weapon or an identification mark was discovered, or in whose case it was established by at least two witnesses that they had fired upon the German troops, should be shot. It is an utter impossibility, according to my firm conviction, that any innocent man should have lost his life....”
But was there really “clear proof of guilt” in any of these cases? Not one of these “identification marks” (assumed to establish that the bearer was a member of the Belgian Army) has been brought forward as material evidence by the German Government. And was the other material evidence so clear? One man, for instance,[276] had a German bullet in his pocket which he had picked up in the street. “He was shot down, and two of his comrades had to make a pit and bury him in the place where he was shot.”[277] One priest was shot “because he had purposely enticed the soldiers, according to their testimony, under the fire of the franc-tireurs.”[278] Two other priests were shot “for distributing ammunition to civilians,”[279] but this was only a story heard from General Headquarters at second-hand. The witness who tells it was sent with a squad “to set on fire two hotels in the Station Square and drive out their inmates. The chief culprits found, apparently, a way of escape in good time over the roofs, since only the proprietor of one of the hotels presented himself at 5.0 o’clock in the morning, and very shortly afterwards received the reward he deserved.” But what was the proof that he deserved it? Not any material evidence on his person, or the testimony of two witnesses who had seen him fire, but simply the fact that he was the only Belgian found in a certain building the inmates of which had been condemned, a priori, as franc-tireurs. The logic of this proceeding is defended by the tradesman interpreter, who submits[280] that “apart from all evidence, the persons brought to trial must have acted somehow in a suspicious manner—otherwise they would never have been brought to trial at all.”
“It is untrue,” nevertheless he states expressly, “that an arbitrary selection among the persons brought forward was made when the order for execution was issued.” But one of the Belgian women[281] held prisoner in the Station Square describes how “the men were placed in rows of five, and the fifth in each row was taken and shot,” as she affirms, “in my presence. If the fifth man happened to be old, his place was taken by the sixth man if he happened to be younger. This was also witnessed by my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, my cousin and our servant....”
“The whole day long,” states another Belgian woman,[282] “I saw civilians being shot—twenty to twenty-five of them, including some monks or priests—in the Station Square and the Boulevard de Tirlemont, opposite the warehouse. The victims were bound four together and placed on the pavement in front of the Maison Hamaide. The soldiers who shot them were on the other side of the Boulevard, on the warehouse roof. For that matter, the soldiers were firing everywhere in all directions.”
The executions were also witnessed by the German troops. “On the morning of August 26th,” states a soldier,[283] “I saw many civilians, more than a hundred, among them five priests, shot at the Station Square in Louvain because they had fired on German troops or because weapons were found on their persons.”
This went on all day, and all day the women were compelled to watch it, while the surviving men were marched away in batches, and the houses on either side of the railway continued to burn. When night came the women were confined in the Station. “My aunt,” continues the witness quoted above,[284] “was taken to the Station with her baby and kept there till the morning. It rained all the night, and she wrapped the baby in her skirt. The baby cried for food, and a German soldier gave the child a little water, and took my aunt and the child to an empty railway-carriage. Some other women got into the carriage with her, but during the whole night the Germans fired at the carriage for amusement....”
The firing by German soldiers had never ceased since the first outbreak at 8.0 o’clock the evening before. An eye-witness records two bursts of it on the 26th—one at 5.0 p.m., and a more serious one at 8.45.[285] This firing was due in part to panic, but was in part of a more deliberate character. “The whole day,” states a Belgian witness,[286] “the soldiers went and came through the streets, saying: ‘Man hat geschossen,’ but it seems that the shots came from the soldiers themselves. I myself saw a soldier going through the streets shooting peacefully in the air.” There was also killing in cold blood. A café proprietor and his daughter were shot by two German soldiers waiting to be served. The other daughter crept under a table and escaped.[287]
The women held prisoner at the Station were only released at 8.0 o’clock on the morning of the 27th,[288] but they had suffered less during these hours than the men. “Of the men,” as a German witness puts it,[289] “some were shot according to Martial Law. In the case of a large number of others it was, however, impossible to determine whether they had taken part in the shooting. These persons were placed for the moment in the Station; some of them were conveyed elsewhere.”