Everybody knows of the case of M. Max, mayor of Brussels, who was imprisoned at Glatz; but Brussels did not pay punctually the war tax which the Germans had levied on it.
Often the hostages whom the Germans appeared to have taken merely for the time of their passing through disappeared. This was the case at Gueraid, Seine-et-Marne, where, of six hostages whom the Germans took, one only was able to escape and to return to the country; and at Révigny, where one of the hostages, a man named Wladimir Thomas, was never set at liberty again.
In other cases the hostages were shamefully ill-treated. M. Colin, a Professor of Science at the Louis-le-Grand Lycée at Paris, who happened to be rusticating at Cogney, was carried off barefoot and in his shirt, loaded with insults as he went. Enraged at the treatment which other people and especially children were made to undergo, M. Colin said to a lieutenant, “Have you not a mother?” “My mother,” the German officer had the insolence to reply, “did not give birth to ⸺ like you!”
The hostages taken at Lunéville were no less brutally treated. Neither violence nor outrage was spared these peaceful citizens. They were put with their backs to the parapet of a bridge, before the houses in the town were set fire to, and the German troops who passed by behaved brutally to them. As an officer accused them of having fired on the Germans, a teacher among them pledged his word of honour that it was not so. “You French ⸺,” said the officer, “do not speak of honour, for you have none.” One of the hostages taken at Lunéville, named Rebb (sixty-two years of age), was pummelled on the face with the butt-end of a rifle, and bayoneted in the side. Nevertheless he continued to follow the column, although he lost much blood. Then a Bavarian amused himself by inflicting fresh blows upon him and throwing a bucket at his head.
The wretched old man died on the way, between Hénaménil and Bures.
Massacre of Hostages
At Blamont in Lorraine, ex-Mayor Barthélemy, aged forty-six years, was taken as a hostage and shot. The same fate awaited the then mayor and the chief people in the locality; when the French entered the town they found notices on the walls announcing that these people would be shot on the following morning.
This was also the case at Courtacon (Seine-et-Marne), where five men and a child of thirteen years, taken as hostages, were exposed to the French fire during an engagement. Another hostage, named Rousseau, a conscript of the 1914 class, arrested in the same commune, was murdered under tragic conditions.
Questioned about the military position of this young man, the mayor, who happened to be amongst the hostages, replied that Rousseau had passed the military court, that he had been passed as fit for service, but that his class had not yet been called up. The Germans then made the prisoner undress, in order to discover what was his physical condition, then they put on his trousers again and shot him fifty metres away from his compatriots.