BOORT MEERBEEK.—At Boort Meerbeek a German soldier was seen to fire three times at a little girl 5 years old. Having failed to hit her, he subsequently bayoneted her. He was killed with the butt end of a rifle by a Belgian soldier who had seen him commit this murder from a distance.
HERENT.—At Herent the charred body of a civilian was found in a butcher's shop, and in a handcart twenty yards away was the dead body of a laborer.
Two eyewitnesses relate that a German soldier shot a civilian and stabbed him with a bayonet as he lay. He then made one of these witnesses, a civilian prisoner, smell the blood on the bayonet.
HAECHT.—At Haecht the bodies of ten civilians were seen lying in a row by a brewery wall.
In a laborer's house, which had been broken up, the mutilated corpse of a woman of 30 to 35 was discovered.
A child of 3 with its stomach cut open by a bayonet was lying near a house.
WERCHTER.—At Werchter the corpses of a man and woman and four younger persons were found in one house. It is stated that they had been murdered because one of the latter, a girl, would not allow the Germans to outrage her.
This catalogue of crimes does not by any means represent the sum total of the depositions relating to this district laid before the committee. The above are given merely as examples of acts which the evidence shows to have taken place in numbers that might have seemed scarcely credible.
In the rest of the district, that is to say, Aerschot and the other villages from which the Germans had not been driven, the effect of the battle was to cause a recrudescence of murder, arson, pillage, and cruelty, which had to some extent died down after Aug. 20 or 21.
In Aerschot itself fresh prisoners seem to have been taken and added to those who were already in the church, since it would appear that prisoners were kept to some extent in the church during the whole of the German occupation of Aerschot. The second occasion on which large numbers of prisoners were put there was shortly after the battle of Malines, and it was then that the priest of Gelrode was brought to Aerschot Church, treated abominably, and finally murdered.