At Rotselaer, for instance, they set fire to about fifteen houses. A German officer, addressing an inhabitant whose house was afire, wanted to make him declare, at the point of a pistol, that the fire had been started by the Belgians. When this inhabitant protested, claiming that the Belgians had left the town the previous evening, this officer declared that if the Germans had set fire to the town it was due probably to the fact that the civilians had fired at them, a fact which is also denied by all the witnesses.
There, too, the German troops pillaged everything they could lay their hands on during their passage.
Up to this writing the Commission of Inquiry has been unable to obtain the testimony of inhabitants of Diest and Tirlemont, which towns were occupied by the Germans on the 18th and 19th of August, 1914, and which are cut off from communication.
However, the inhabitants of Schaffen, a town near Diest, have stated that the same abominations were committed in their locality and in the adjoining communities, Lummen and Molenstede. The whole region has been laid waste. German troops, at an hour's distance from Diest, had begun their work of destruction all along the highway from Diest to Beeringen. Turning upon Diest they set fire to everything they could lay hands on—farms, houses, furniture. Arriving at the village of Schaffen, the Germans set fire to the town, massacring the few inhabitants who remained behind, and whom they found in their houses or in the streets.
The witness gives the names and addresses of eighteen persons whom he knows to have been massacred.
Among them are:
The wife of Francois Luyck, 45 years old, and her 12-year-old daughter, who were discovered in a sewer and shot.
The daughter of Jean Ouyen, 9 years old, who was shot.
Andre Willem, 23 years old, sexton, who was tied to a tree and burned alive.
Joseph Reynders, forty years old, who was killed together with his nephew, a lad of ten years.