General Stenger issued a printed order to kill all the wounded;
Bissing was the refined torturer of all Belgium, in many orders;
Manteuffel was the chief murderer at Louvain;
Bulow and Schonmann were the wild beasts of Ardenne;
And it was Bayer at Dinant, Bohn at Sommerfeld and Termonde; Nieher at Wavre; Wittenstein at Clermont-en-Argonne, and so on until you are tired.
1. THE MURDER OF CIVILIANS.
This flourishing German industry began at Louvain, at the very outbreak of the war, and has continued right down to the present. It is astounding to see how quickly murders began, with the most revolting brutality, immediately after the Germans entered Belgium! Sometimes the excuse was made that "Mann hat geschossen",—that "civilians have fired";—and then the indiscriminate slaughter began.
The thick volume of "Evidence" taken by the Bryce Commission on the German Atrocities is crowded full of testimony; and so are many subsequent publications of the British and French governments. The stories written down in their diaries by German soldiers are both terrible and amazing. In an uncountable number of villages old men, old women, boys, girls, women and children were shot by dozens and by hundreds; and hundreds were stabbed to death by bayonets.
There are sickening accounts, from eye-witness testimony, of German soldiers bayoneting children and girls, but the most spectacular crime of that kind was committed at Malaines (d4, Bryce Evidence), when a German soldier walking down the main street, singing, "drove his bayonet with both hands through a living child's stomach, lifting the child into the air on his bayonet, and carrying it away on his bayonet, he and his comrades still singing." (Page 82.)
In the village of Sempst, an Uhlan cut off the breast of a woman with his sword; and a little boy was burned to death in an attic. (K. 33.) At Aerschot a girl of 18 or 20 was found "absolutely naked, with her abdomen cut open", and "her body covered with bruises, showing that she had made a struggle." Jack the Ripper in a spiked helmet!