of their homes, provided a sad spectacle to such as were sober enough to see.  A humane German officer, witnessing the ruin of Aerschot, exclaims in disgust:  “I am a father myself, and I cannot bear this.  It is not war, but butchery.”  Officers as well as men succumbed to the temptation of drink, with results which may be illustrated by an incident which occurred at Campenhout.  In this village there was a certain well-to-do merchant (name given) who had a good cellar of champagne.  On the afternoon of the 14th or 15th of August three German cavalry officers entered the house and demanded champagne.  Having drunk ten bottles and invited five or six officers and three or four private soldiers to join them, they continued their carouse, and then called for the master and mistress of the house.

“Immediately my mistress came in,” says the valet de chambre, “one of the officers who was sitting on the floor got up, and, putting a revolver to my mistress temple, shot her dead.  The officer was obviously drunk.  The other officers continued to drink and sing, and they did not pay great attention to the killing of my mistress.  The officer who shot my mistress then told my master to dig a grave and bury my mistress.  My master and the officer went into the garden, the officer threatening my master with a pistol.  My master was then forced to dig the grave and to bury the body of my mistress in it.  I cannot say for what reason they killed my mistress.  The officer who did it was singing all the time.”

In the evidence before us there are cases tending to show that aggravated crimes against women were sometimes severely punished.  One witness reports that a young girl who was being pursued by a drunken soldier at Louvain appealed to a German officer, and that the offender was then and there shot.  Another describes how an officer of the Thirty-second Regiment of the Line was led out to execution for the violation of two young girls, but reprieved at the request or with the consent of the girls’ mother.  These instances are sufficient to show that the maltreatment of women was no part of the military scheme of the invaders, however much it may appear to have been the inevitable result of the system of terror deliberately adopted in certain regions.  Indeed, so much is avowed.  “I asked the commander why we had been spared,” says a lady in Louvain, who deposes to having suffered much brutal treatment during the sack.  He said:  “We will not hurt you any more.  Stay in Louvain.  All is finished.”  It was Saturday, Aug. 29, and the reign of terror was over.

Apart from the crimes committed in special areas and belonging to a scheme of systematic reprisals for the alleged shooting by civilians, there is evidence of offenses committed against women and children by individual soldiers, or by small groups of soldiers, both in the advance through Belgium and France as in the retreat from the Marne.  Indeed, the discipline appears to have been loose during the retreat, and there is evidence as to the burning of villages and the murder and violation of their female inhabitants during this episode of the war.