te system and
organization of destruction frightened them more than the actual fire
itself. Every German soldier had a little hatchet, and when Charleroi
was fired, they simply went down the street as if they had been drilled
to it for months, cutting a square hole in the panel of each door, and
throwing a ball of celluloid filled with benzine inside. This exploded
and set the house on fire, and later on the soldiers would return to see
if it was burning well. They were entirely indifferent as to whether
anyone were inside or not, as the following incident, which came under
my notice, will show. Two English Red Cross Sisters were working at an
ambulance in Charleroi, and lodging with some people in the centre of
the city. When the town was being burnt they asked leave to go and try
to save some of their possessions. They arrived at the house, however,
and found it entirely burnt down, and all their things destroyed. They
were returning rather sorrowfully to their hospital when an old woman
accosted them and told them that a woman with a new-born infant was
lying in bed in one of the burning houses.

The house was not burning badly, and they got into it quite easily and
found the woman lying in bed with her little infant beside her, almost
out of her wits with terror, but too weak to move. The nurses found they
could not manage alone, so went down into the street to find a man. They
found, after some trouble, a man who had only one arm and got him to
help them take the woman to the hospital. One of the nurses was carrying
the baby, the other with the one-armed man was supporting the mother,
when the German soldiers fired at the little party, and the one-armed
man fell bleeding at the side of the road. The Sisters were obliged to
leave him for the moment, and went on with the mother and infant to the
hospital, got a stretcher and came back and fetched the man and brought
him also to the hospital. It was only a flesh wound in the shoulder and
he made a good recovery, but what a pitiful little group to waste
ammunition on--a newly confined mother and her infant, two Red Cross
Sisters and a crippled man.

One can only imagine that they were drunk when they did these kind of
things, for individually the German soldier is generally a decent
fellow, though some of the Prussian officers are unspeakable. Discipline
is very severe and the soldiers are obliged to carry out orders without
troubling themselves about rights and wrong