CHAPTER XII
OFFENCES AGAINST CHILDREN, OLD PEOPLE AND PRIESTS
The plea of reprisals is no more valid in the case of children, old people and priests than it is in the case of women. All these classes of people have a right to consideration and to absolute respect from the invader. Every crime committed against them can bear no other name than wanton cruelty.
In the foregoing pages we have seen how children were killed with their mothers, and old women were outraged and killed. We must now unfold the chapter of crimes against the weak and against those whose character should have saved them from the violences of war. Ill-treatment, imprisonment, wounds, murder, torture—all these we hardly like to think that children, the personification of weakness and innocence, have had to suffer. Such has been the cruelty of the German troops in the field, that what has moved all men’s interest and compassion has, in several cases, only urged them on the more readily to violence.
Belgian and French Children ill-treated, wounded and killed
We have already told the story of the ill-treatment to which six to eight thousand people, who were packed together standing in the riding-school and had to pass the night there, were exposed at Louvain. A number of children were included in these. Several endured great hardships, and the youngest died in their mothers’ arms. At Dinant, in the slaughter which took place, several children were massacred.
In other cases we see that children were exposed to exceptional acts of violence. “On the way back from Tirlemont,” writes the special correspondent of the Times (29th August, 1914), “I met a little girl of eleven years old, who was stumbling and groping before her as if blind. A stroke of a lance had laid open her cheek and her eye. A poor peasant woman, her face wet with tears, told me that her husband had been killed in her presence by German horsemen, that two of her children, who were under nine years of age, had been trampled by their horses and that two others were missing. And this” (concluded the English journalist) “is not an isolated case; it is an example of what happens day by day in the areas occupied by the German soldiers, and, I regret to say, it is only an example among hundreds which have been attested beyond any possibility of doubt.”
Instances abound, and the following are a selection. At Louguyon, out of 153 people who were shot on the 23rd, 24th and 25th August by soldiers of the 102nd and 112th Prussian regiments, there were twelve children.
At Bantheville (Meuse), young Felix Miquel, aged about fifteen years, who had hidden behind a heap of wood so that he might not be arrested, got a violent sabre thrust from the soldier who discovered him, which split his lips; afterwards, as he was being led away, when he tried to hide in a wood, he stumbled against a sentinel, who with a bayonet stroke cut off a joint of his left hand.
At Mouchy Humières (Oise) a little four-year-old girl, who belonged to a family living in Verdun, was wounded on the 31st August by a German soldier. On the way from Bouligny to Mourière (Meuse) a child of fifteen years was shot in the groin as she was passing quietly by a wood in which a German patrol was concealed.
At Spontin, near Dinant, fearful reprisals were carried out because a poacher had killed a Prussian officer, and children of all ages were shot or butchered with their mothers.