rtheast, east, and
south were covered with German Death's Head Hussars and Uhlans pressing
forward to seize the passage over the Meuse. From the very beginning of
the operations the civilian population of the villages lying upon the
line of the German advance were made to experience the extreme horrors
of war. "On the 4th of August," says one witness, "at Herve," (a village
not far from the frontier,) "I saw at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon,
near the station, five Uhlans; these were the first German troops I had
seen. They were followed by a German officer and some soldiers in a
motor car. The men in the car called out to a couple of young fellows
who were standing about thirty yards away. The young men, being afraid,
ran off and then the Germans fired and killed one of them named D." The
murder of this innocent fugitive civilian was a prelude to the burning
and pillage of Herve and of other villages in the neighborhood, to the
indiscriminate shooting of civilians of both sexes, and to the organized
military execution of batches of selected males. Thus at Herve some
fifty men escaping from the burning houses were seized, taken outside
the town and shot. At Melen, a hamlet west of Herve, forty men were
shot. In one household alone the father and mother (names given) were
shot, the daughter died after being repeatedly outraged, and the son was
wounded. Nor were children exempt. "About Aug. 4," says one witness,
"near Vottem, we were pursuing some Uhlans. I saw a man, woman, and a
girl about nine, who had been killed. They were on the threshold of a
house, one on the top of the other, as if they had been shot down, one
after the other, as they tried to escape."

The burning of the villages in this neighborhood and the wholesale
slaughter of civilians, such as occurred at Herve, Micheroux, and
Soumagne, appear to be connected with the exasperation caused by the
resistance of Fort Fleron, whose guns barred the main road from Aix la
Chapelle to Liege. Enraged by the losses which they had sustained,
suspicious of the temper of the civilian population, and probably
thinking that by exceptional severities at the outset they could cow the
spirit of the Belgian Nation, the German officers and men speedily
accustomed themselves to the slaughter of civilians. How rapidly the
process was effected is illustrated by an entry in the diary of Kurt
Hoffman, a one-year's man in the First Jaegers, who on Aug. 5 was in
front of Fort Flero