and defenceless victim of the Kaiser’s gallant army! He adds: ‘We fled from the scene that must for ever blur the scutcheon of the Kaiser, and I pray as long as I live it will never be my task to see such an inferno again.’
“Absolutely incredible was the picture of incidents connected with the burning of Visé by the Germans and the shooting given in private letters which arrived from Eysden, on the Dutch frontier, and seen by the Telegraaf. According to these letters, the Germans alleged that the citizens had fired on the troops. All the inhabitants were then hunted out of their houses to spend the night in the square watching the burning. Men were taken prisoners, and possibly shot, and the rest were driven out of the town, which was given to the flames. Eysden is filled with refugees—one hundred and fifty in one canteen and two hundred and fifty in the Protestant Church, while four hundred have been sent to Maastricht.
“Two trainloads of refugees came into Brussels from the Tirlemont district. The scenes I have witnessed,” telegraphs a Press Association correspondent, “and the stories told by these poor people would melt a heart of stone. Removal from the face of the earth—a phrase of the German papers themselves—continues to be the invader’s idea of how best to deal with unarmed, unoffending villages, the only crime of whose people is that they have fallen in his path.
“The Germans entered Tirlemont, in the vicinity of which they have been for some days. They were in strong force, mostly cavalry and artillery. The big guns shelled the place, and the cavalry played at war by attacking the flying and panic-stricken populace, shooting and stabbing them at random.
“Never have I seen such a picture of woe as a peasant woman and five children who stood bewildered in the Place de la Gare here, all crying as if their hearts would break. It was a terrible story the woman had to tell. ‘They shot my husband before my eyes,’ she said, ‘and trampled two of my children to death.’
“A German knocked at the door of the house of the Burgomaster at Venne, near the Dutch frontier, and when the Burgomaster’s wife opened the door she was knocked down and killed with the butt end of a rifle.
“A solicitor, who was a member of the Belgian Chamber, and who was staying in the house, rushed to the front door, and he also was instantly knocked down and killed with a bayonet thrust. On hearing of these atrocities the population fled in terror.”
Lancer’s Fiendish Act.
M. Isadore Felix Cruls, a Belgian refugee who arrived in London, had a tragic story to tell. He carried on a prosperous printing business at Saint Jossé, a suburb of Brussels. When hostilities broke out he was called up for service in the Civil Guard, and stationed on the Chaussée de Louvain, the road between Louvain and Brussels. As reported in the Daily Telegraph, he stated:—