But they—what are they doing with our little children? Here's a letter from a lady friend—a great musician. "My son-in-law, Lieutenant —— has been defending Verdun since August. He's all right. But when will these barbarians be entirely driven away? Lately my son-in-law had a German soldier who was very badly wounded picked up. When stripping him to give him aid they found a child's hand in his pocket. He was immediately shot."
Don't think it's a single case. The children who are mutilated, assassinated, burned, are counted by hundreds. At Blamont, in the presence of the Baroness de V——, the Germans killed a child in its mother's arms. "Why did you do that?" asked the Baroness. "We are obliged to, otherwise we are shot," replied the men.
Witnesses who have seen like things are too numerous to be counted. Everybody in France remembers the sad question of the little girl who asked her mother, "Will Santa Claus bring me back my hands for Christmas?"
Some time I shall go into the details of the arrival of the Belgian children in Paris, with their terrorized looks, their screams of fear if anyone approached them. I haven't yet the courage to go over it. The memory I am going to call up is almost as frightful, though. It was Sunday, August 30. All at once I got a telephone call from a hospital where I often assisted: "Come, quick; they're bringing a lot of wounded."
As I arrived they were carrying in a young woman, either dead or unconscious. Everybody was under the strain of deep emotion. We undressed her. Her body was horribly mutilated with hideous wounds. She was the victim of the first "taube," as the Parisiennes called the German aeroplanes. She was passing along the street, humble and inoffensive. Her husband was at the front. She had a child at home. From above death smote her. The French gave men wings, and that is how the barbarians use them.
I left the young woman dead. I went to see the child. He was playing at a table, laughing. The contrast was so sad I couldn't stand it. I took away his toys. "You mustn't play any more just now, baby. You will not see your mother again to-day." He looked up at me sadly as if he understood. I took him in my arms and wept over him.
There is a little—so little—of what I have seen and heard.
Just as I finished writing I received a photograph from the painter Guirand de Scévola, showing an old woman of sixty-five, who had been attacked—then slaughtered. With it was a part of the Belgium official report, not yet made public. I shall divulge the paragraph: "September 11th, Josephy Louis Buron, of the Twenty-fourth regiment of the line, declared that having been made prisoner by the Germans, near Aerschot, they made him plunge both hands into a kettle of boiling water. Dr. Thone, of the Twenty-fourth regiment of the line, declared he saw the wounds of the hero." (Told in the New York American.)