In the course of my travels I happened to run across two Belgians, one of whom had a brother at Andenne. Upon learning that I was an American he became very friendly and confidential and requested that I call upon his brother, giving me a card to him and assuring me that I would find a cordial reception. He said Andenne presented one of the saddest spectacles of the entire district and his brother had passed through the whole ordeal. At the time he told me this I was on my way from Liége to Namur. It was necessary to take a horse conveyance a part of the distance, between Flémalle and Huy, and I had this conversation with him in the hack. I was very glad to act upon his suggestion and instead of going into Namur that evening I got off at Andenne. It was not difficult to find the man's brother and when I gave him the card and told him I was an American he certainly did treat me royally. That evening we talked far into the night. He showed me the destruction which the Germans had wrought in his own home and told me of the things they had stolen from him. Incidentally, the desk in his front room had been locked when the Germans broke into the house, but they had overturned it, smashed the drawers in from the bottom and thoroughly looted it.
The next morning he took me for a walk through the town. As we went through the streets I noticed that every house in the place had been riddled with bullet holes. There were hundreds of holes right through the solid brick. The German machine gunners had simply gone through the place and raked every house so that if there was a single person in it, even asleep in his bed, those bullets would seek him out and send him to meet his God. Besides this, every house had the front doors and windows smashed in and now temporary boardings were nailed up in the place of them. By and by in the progress of our walk we came to the edge of the town.
There, along the side of the road, he showed me two tremendous graves side by side. I am sure they were not less than fifteen by twenty-five feet in dimension and piled up a couple of feet high with quicklime.
"There are sixty of my fellow-townsmen buried in each one of those graves," said my escort. "Piled in there three deep. These men were shot down by the German soldiers when they entered the town for no other offense than that of being Belgian citizens."
The thing seemed incredible. "Are you certain about this?" I asked him. "Were you personally acquainted with these innocent people who were murdered?"
"I have lived here all my life," he replied, "and I am thirty-five years old. This was a place of four thousand people before the war and naturally I must have known almost everybody in the town."
I then said to him, "Would you be willing to give me a list of the names of some of the people whom you know to have been innocently murdered?" He said he would be very glad to do so, and when we got back to his house he took a piece of paper and in a very few minutes' time wrote out a list of fifteen or twenty names, bracketing those which belonged to the same family. In some instances whole families of three to five people were annihilated by the Germans.
That little piece of paper later on came very nearly getting me executed. But it served to show the deliberate policy of terrorism and frightfulness which the Huns pursued. The man pointed out house after house, naming the owner and his occupation where these murders had been committed.
Later on I went to Aerschot. I had read in the Bryce report of Aerschot. When I entered the town on the electric tram car I saw the old familiar sight. It was the spectacle of gable ends of houses and stores sticking up toward heaven, the roofs having fallen in, all burned out inside and gaping at me from the smoke-blackened window holes where formerly the faces of the little children smiled. The whole town was in ruins. I entered a little shack where a woman was keeping store. We had a short conversation about the tragic experiences there and finally when I started to leave she became excited and frantic. I saw anger and tears coming into her eyes and she shot forth her hand and almost screamed, "Yes, and my own husband was shot down by my side also, as we were hiding in the cellar! We saw the German soldiers coming and we rushed below for refuge. They broke into our house, stole what they wanted, and then hunted us out in the cellar and shot my husband by my side. They then seized my own father, sixty-eight years of age, handcuffed him and dragged him out to the public square where with numbers of others of our townsmen he was shot down in cold blood and left lying unburied on the open square for two nights and two days. They wouldn't even let me bury him."