(b) The Treatment of Women and Children.

The evidence shows that the German authorities, when carrying out a policy of systematic arson and plunder in selected districts, usually drew some distinction between the adult male population on the one hand and the women and children on the other.  It was a frequent practice to set apart the adult males of the condemned district with a view to the execution of a suitable number—­preferably of the younger and more vigorous—­and to reserve the women and children for milder treatment.  The depositions, however, present many instances of calculated cruelty, often going the length of murder, toward the women and children of the condemned area.  We have already referred to the case of Aerschot, where the women and children were herded in a church which had recently been used as a stable, detained for forty-eight hours with no food other than coarse bread, and denied the common decencies of life.  At Dinant sixty women and children were confined in the cellar of a convent from Sunday morning till the following Friday, (Aug. 28,) sleeping on the ground, for there were no beds, with nothing to drink during the whole period, and given no food until the Wednesday, “when somebody threw into the cellar two sticks of macaroni and a carrot for each prisoner.”  In other cases the women and children were marched for long distances along roads, (e.g., march of women from Louvain to Tirlemont, Aug. 28,) the laggards pricked on by the attendant Uhlans.  A lady complains of having been brutally kicked by privates.  Others were struck with the butt end of rifles.  At Louvain, at Liege, at Aerschot, at Malines, at Montigny, at Andenne, and elsewhere, there is evidence that the troops were not restrained from drunkenness, and drunken soldiers cannot to be trusted to observe the rules or decencies of war, least of all when they are called upon to execute a preordained plan of arson and pillage.  From the very first women were not safe.  At Liege women and children were chased about the streets by soldiers.  A witness gives a story, very circumstantial in its details, of how women were publicly raped in the market place of the city, five young German officers assisting.  At Aerschot men and women were deliberately shot when coming out of burning houses.  At Liege, Louvain, Sempst, and Malines women were burned to death, either because they were surprised and stupefied by the fumes of the conflagration or because they were prevented from escaping by German soldiers.  Witnesses recount how a great crowd of men, women, and children from Aerschot were marched to Louvain, and then suddenly exposed to a fire from a mitrailleuse and rifles.  “We were all placed,” recounts a sufferer, “in Station Street, Louvain, and the German soldiers fired on us.  I saw the corpses of some women in the street.  I fell down, and a woman who had been shot fell on top of me.”  Women and children suddenly turned out into the streets, and, compelled to witness the destruction by fire