distance.

HERENT.--At Herent the charred body of a civilian was found in a
butcher's shop, and in a handcart twenty yards away was the dead body of
a laborer.

Two eyewitnesses relate that a German soldier shot a civilian and
stabbed him with a bayonet as he lay. He then made one of these
witnesses, a civilian prisoner, smell the blood on the bayonet.

HAECHT.--At Haecht the bodies of ten civilians were seen lying in a row
by a brewery wall.

In a laborer's house, which had been broken up, the mutilated corpse of
a woman of 30 to 35 was discovered.

A child of 3 with its stomach cut open by a bayonet was lying near a
house.

WERCHTER.--At Werchter the corpses of a man and woman and four younger
persons were found in one house. It is stated that they had been
murdered because one of the latter, a girl, would not allow the Germans
to outrage her.

This catalogue of crimes does not by any means represent the sum total
of the depositions relating to this district laid before the committee.
The above are given merely as examples of acts which the evidence shows
to have taken place in numbers that might have seemed scarcely credible.

In the rest of the district, that is to say, Aerschot and the other
villages from which the Germans had not been driven, the effect of the
battle was to cause a recrudescence of murder, arson, pillage, and
cruelty, which had to some extent died down after Aug. 20 or 21.

In Aerschot itself fresh prisoners seem to have been taken and added to
those who were already in the church, since it would appear that
prisoners were kept to some extent in the church during the whole of
the German occupation of Aerschot. The second occasion on which large
numbers of prisoners were put there was shortly after the battle of
Malines, and it was then that the priest of Gelrode was brought to
Aerschot Church, treated abominably, and finally murdered.

[Illustration: GENERAL SIR WILLIAM ROBERTSON, K.C.B.

Chief of the British General Staff, Who Made a Remarkable Record as
Quartermaster General in France

_(Photo from Bain News Service.)_]

[Illustration: GENERAL FOCH

The Brilliant Strategist Who Commands the French Armies of the North

_(Photo from P.S. Rogers.)_]

One witness describes the scene graphically:

"The whole of the prisoners--men, women and children--were
placed in the church. Nobody was allowed to go outside the
church to obey the calls of nature; the church ha