er to excuse their violence, declare that, wherever
they have shot civilians or burned and pillaged towns and villages,
armed resistance has been offered by the inhabitants. While there may
possibly have been isolated instances of this kind, that is nothing more
than occurs in all wars, and if they had confined themselves to
executing the guilty persons we could only have bowed before the rigor
of military law. But in no case could individual and absolutely
exceptional acts of aggression justify the wholesale measures of
repression which have been adopted against the persons and the property
of the inhabitants of our towns and villages--the shooting, the burning,
the pillaging which has proceeded pretty well everywhere in our country,
not only by way of reprisals but with a refinement of cruelty. Moreover,
no provocation has been proved at Vise, Marsage, Louvain, Wavre,
Termonde, and other places which have been entirely and deliberately
destroyed several days after being occupied, not to mention the
systematic burning of isolated buildings situated in the line of march
of the troops, and the shooting of the unfortunate inhabitants who fled.

The Germans have asserted in their newspapers that the Belgian
Government distributed to the civil population arms which were to be
used against the invaders. They add that the Catholic clergy preached a
sort of holy war and incited their flock everywhere to massacre the
Germans. Finally, they have declared, in order to justify the massacres
of women, that women showed themselves as ferocious as the men, and went
so far as to pour boiling oil from their windows upon the troops on the
march.

A Tissue of Falsehoods.

All these allegations are so many falsehoods. Far from having
distributed arms, the authorities everywhere on the approach of the
enemy disarmed the inhabitants. The Burgomasters everywhere warned the
townspeople against acts of violence, which would involve reprisals. The
clergy have unceasingly preached calm to their flock. As for the women,
if we except a story in a foreign newspaper, the source of which is
suspected, everything shows that their only anxiety was to escape the
horrors of a ruthless war.

The true motives for the atrocities the moving evidence of which we have
gathered can only be, on the one hand, the desire to terrorize and
demoralize the people in accordance with the inhuman theories of German
military writers, and, on the other hand, the desire