At Hofstade chance favoured them better; they threw Victor de Coster, whom they had just stripped, into the furnace provided by his own house; his servant shared his fate.
We must suppose that the Germans take great pleasure in the contortions of the hanged. Herr Heymel had to content himself with admiring the corpse of a priest swinging in a tree; and his friend, Herr Klemm, was careful to devote, to the memory of this comforting spectacle, a drawing, published in Kunst und Künstler (January 1915). Herr Heymel expresses his great satisfaction before this spectacle; but what pleasure he would have experienced could he have witnessed the hanging of the men whom the Germans boast of having hanged to the trees of the Herve district; or could he have assisted to hang that inhabitant of Èvelette, whom the soldiers put to death at Andenne, on the 20th; or the cabaret-keeper who was strung up to a lantern before the Louvain railway-station, on the night of the 26th; but our fastidious littérateur would have tasted the keenest delight at Arlon, when an old man was put to death; he remained hanging for hours, with his feet just grazing the soil (p. [351]).
The Germans, perhaps, will say—supposing they think they ought to excuse themselves—that these executions were carried out as a result of the attacks of francs-tireurs, or after the mutilation of the German wounded by Belgian civilians. But it will be impossible for them to allege these lies as circumstances extenuating the inhuman treatment which they inflicted upon Belgian soldiers at the time of their first attacks on the forts of Liége, on the night of the 4th August; that is, a few hours after the commencement of hostilities. Not only did they maltreat in every imaginable manner their Belgian prisoners, but certain German soldiers pushed Kultur so far as to refuse water to poor wounded fellows dying of thirst; more, they even gave themselves the atrocious pleasure of spilling on the ground the water contained in the wounded men's own flasks, and this before their eyes.
3. Moral Tortures.
The physical tortures which the Germans have inflicted upon us cannot rival their methods of moral torture. In these they have achieved refinements worthy of the inventive genius of an Edgar Allan Poë.
Moral Torture before Execution.
To force those about to be shot to dig their own graves, as they did at Tavigny,[49] is quite a commonplace method. In the Fonds de Leffe, on the 23rd August, 1914 (p. [360]), they perfected their mode of operation. They had called up eight men of Dinant to bury the victims as they were shot (there was so much work to do that it had to be entrusted to experienced hands). In the evening each of the gravediggers dug his own grave; four were shot, and buried by their colleagues; just as these were about to suffer the same fate an officer "pardoned" them: not out of humanity (that would have been too decent), but simply because their services would be required during the following days.
At Dinant, during the bloody days of the 23rd and 24th August, they invented many other moral tortures. On the morning of the 23rd they shot, in a meadow of the Fonds de Leffe, a group of thirteen men. But instead of leading them all together before the firing platoon, they cunningly prolonged their pleasure; the thirteen unfortunates were tied, in succession, to the same tree, and shot down one by one.
The whole of the 23rd was consecrated, in the Fonds de Leffe, to killing the men in small batches of half a dozen; these were shot either before their wives and children, or at a short distance, but within earshot, so that the family should lose none of the groans of the dying.