THE MURDER, TORTURE AND VIOLATION OF WOMEN IN INVADED TERRITORY

The present and following chapters will contain the most abominable part of this indictment. We shall read the story of outrages of which women have been made victims by the German scoundrels. Were not these outrages, established as they are by certain reports, and confirmed by confessions which the Germans themselves have inadvertently made, the result of the unbridled instincts of an army in a state of delirium? We should like to think so, but the details to hand with regard to the circumstances under which these acts were performed compel us to recognise that something more is involved in them. They reveal the presence of cruelty and thirst for innocent blood in the perpetrators of these murders and acts of violence.

Crimes committed against octogenarian old women seem to issue from a special hatred, directed against those who gave birth to their enemies of to-day. The number of acts of violation committed by these invaders proves that there is inherent in the German mind a peculiar contempt for all human laws, a regular bestiality, a cynical audacity, which, if the reins are given to it, borders on madness.

In the performance of these abominable acts the Germans showed no trace of humanity. Their thoughts[105] were incapable of going back to themselves and their fatherland, to the daughters, the fiancées, the wives, the mothers whom they themselves had left at home; wholesale murders, mutilations, tortures, treatment so frightful as to drive the victims crazy, refinements of cruelty by which the relatives and parents of the latter were made partners in their punishment, and in which, as we have seen, neither organisation nor method was wanting—such are the acts of which we are about to give proofs and examples.
Murders

In the story of the murders committed by the Germans, of which women have been the victims, we see almost always that these were surprised in the midst of their common daily tasks. The horror of the crime committed against them is enhanced. It is still worse when the massacred women were about to perform some act of charity. At Tamines, in Belgium, a woman was killed in the middle of the street as she was carrying a sick old man. At Mayen-Multien a woman named Laforest was seriously wounded, in the beginning of September, by a German horseman to whom she and her husband had been obliged to give hospitality. His excuse was that they were too long about serving him. At Hazebrouck, in the middle of the month of October, a German soldier, who was riding a bicycle, seeing in a corner a poor mother seated with her child sleeping on her knees, transfixed the latter with his bayonet, and at the same time wounded the mother in the thigh, without any of his comrades interfering. At Audun-le-Roman, Mlle. Tréfel was struck at the very moment when she was giving a drink to a German soldier.

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Examples of such acts are innumerable. The most striking instances were those which took place at Malines, Gerbeviller, Audun-le-Roman, Boortmeerbeck, Neuville-en-Artois, Hériménil. At Hériménil, Mme. Truger, twenty-three years old, was shot by order of an officer. At Boortemeerbeck, the maid-servant of Mlle. van Hoorde was killed because she was accused of having assassinated an officer. This officer had committed suicide, after leaving on his table a letter in which he declared his intention. At Lunéville a young girl of sixteen years, Mlle. Weill, was killed in her own house by her father’s side.

In the same town a woman aged ninety-eight years was killed in her bed and thrown into the flames; at Triaucourt, Mme. Maupoix, aged seventy-five years, was so violently kicked that she died some days afterwards. Two other old women of the same place were shot dead. During the following night the Germans played the piano near the corpses. At Nomény several women were forced to make a long march on foot; an old woman, who was just on the verge of a hundred years, fell down in a state of exhaustion and died. At Hofstade, another old woman was found dead by the Belgian soldiers. She had been bayoneted several times as she sat down to sew. At Gerbeviller, widow Guillaume, aged sixty-eight years, was killed by a shot fired point-blank.
Wholesale Murder

In many cases the Germans went as far as general massacres. The excuse invoked by them was a pretended right of reprisals.

The most appalling of these butcheries seems to have been that of Dinant, which took place on the[107] 22nd August and following days. “In these terrible days,” writes a Dutchman, M. Staller, on this topic, in the Telegraaf (translated in the Temps, 19th December, 1914), “at Dinant and also in the neighbouring villages of Anseremme, Leffe and Neffe, more than eight hundred persons were killed, amongst whom there were many women and children.” The XX Siècle published the names of about sixty women, several of whom were octogenarians, and of about forty children. The excuse put forward was that three German soldiers had been killed by the civilians (see further on).

“At Anseremme,” continues the Telegraaf, “eighteen women and two children were concealed under a bridge; the soldiers caught sight of them and fired with a machine-gun until there was no more sign of life; on the following morning they burnt the corpses, probably that they might not be accused of having killed defenceless people. I saw the horrible remains of the fire.”

Another massacre was that witnessed at Louvain. On the 27th August, at 8 o’clock, the order was given to the inhabitants of Louvain to leave the town, as it was going to be bombarded. Amongst these thousands of wretched people, pursued by the brutal soldiers, were large numbers of women, and some, who had not the strength to follow the procession, were shot.
Tortured Women

A humane reader cannot repress a tremor as he learns the story of the tortures inflicted on women by the Germans on several occasions. We should have spared our readers these stories, were it not necessary[108] to pay special attention to them for the purpose of showing how far German barbarism can go.

At Dompierre-aux-Bois, after the bombardment which we have described, the Germans did not want to allow the people shut up in a church which they were bombarding even to go to look for water to tend the wounded. Women were compelled to wait without help, wounded, bruised, mutilated under the eyes of their parents, who were powerless to help them during a time of agony which for some lasted up to twenty-four and thirty-six hours. When they were dead, the Germans forced the men to dig a grave near the cemetery and to bury them in it. One of them found that in this way he was forced to bury without a coffin his wife, her mother and her sisters.

At Révigny the French Commission of Inquiry notes the case of a woman who was found killed in a cellar, with her breast and right arm cut off. Her little son, aged eleven years, also had a foot cut off.

M. Bonne, the senior curate of étain, declares in his report that a woman of Audun-le-Roman, who was suckling her child, was tortured for refusing to give the enemy food. They mangled her abdomen and killed her child.

At Sempst, in Belgium, a woman was bayoneted, covered with petrol, and thrown into the flames. The fact is noted in the second report of the Belgian Commission of Inquiry. M. Pierre Nothomb relates the following facts: “On coming to Averbode, on the 20th August, the Germans saw a woman, who—seized with fear—concealed herself in a ditch. They killed her with lance-thrusts. An hour’s journey from there, at Schaffen, they disembowelled a young girl of twenty years. Peasants from the outskirts of Louvain went to Antwerp, on the 12th September, and told that at[109] Wilzele the Germans wanted to burn alive Mme. Van Kriegelinen and her eleven children. The woman and eight children were burnt. We saw the corpses of the mother and her children, and were present at the execution.” The volunteer gunner de R? unpinned from the ground the bodies of a woman and her child, who were fastened to the ground by bayonets. Asked about what had passed at Boortmeerbeck, Dr. V? of Malines deposed: “Mme. Van Rollegem came to the hospital of Malines on the 22nd August. On Thursday the 20th, as she was fleeing from Boortmeerbeck with her husband, she was shot twice in the leg. She threw herself into the ditch to take shelter. Some minutes later the Germans who had fired on her came up to her again and made horrible wounds in her left thigh and left forearm. She remained like that without help until Saturday evening. The wounds were gangrened and worms were swarming over them.”

During the night of the 23rd to 24th August soldiers knocked violently at the door of the Chateau of Canne, owned by M. Poswick. Mme. Poswick opened the door; she was forthwith bludgeoned with the butt-ends of rifles. On Sunday, the 30th of August, a patrol of hussars, as a Lord’s day recreation, amused themselves by firing, on the Brussels road at Malines, at Catherine Van Kerchove, a woman of seventy-four years of age, at every part of her they could hit without killing her. A rifle shot carried off her right hand, another gashed her cheek. At Battice, before burning houses, the Germans made women go into them and shut them up there.

Sometimes German barbarism spent itself in putting people in captivity. At Dinant many women were kept shut up in the Abbaye des Prémontrés. Here[110] they remained seated on the floor without food. Four of them were confined under these dreadful conditions (see Chap. XIII).
Poland and Serbia

Such acts were outdone at the other end of Europe, in the Eastern theatre of war. In Poland, at Khabbeck, the Austrians mutilated two women on the pretext that civilians were helping the movements of the Russian troops.

In the Podogorsky Arrondissement the Serbian troops found in the village of Jabonka the corpses of a young girl of about ten years old and of three old women, all three alike mutilated. Finally, Professor Reiss, of the University of Lausanne, who visited the Serbian territories invaded by the Austro-Hungarians, confirmed the authenticity of the mutilations in which the invader of Serbia had indulged.

“At Bastave” (he reports in his letter to the Temps of 22nd November) “nearly everybody took to flight when it was known that the Austrian............