her. "They have killed me!" she cried. "Carry me into the
garden." Her children obeyed and laid her at the end of the garden
with a pillow under her head and a blanket over her legs, and then
stretched themselves at the foot of the wall to avoid shells. At the
end of an hour the widow Guillaume was dead. Her daughter wrapped her
in a blanket and placed a handkerchief over her face. Almost
immediately the Germans broke into the garden. They carried off Dehan
and shot him at La Prele, and led his wife away on to the Fraimbois
road, where she found about forty people, principally women and
children, in the enemy's hands, and heard an officer of high rank say:
"We must shoot these women and children. We must make an end of them."
However, the threat was not carried into effect. Mme. Dehan was set at
liberty next day, and was able to return twenty-one days later to
Gerbeviller. She is convinced, and all those who saw the body share
her opinion, that her mother's body had been violated. In fact, the
body was found stretched on its back with the petticoats pushed up,
the legs separated, and the stomach ripped open.
When the Germans arrived M. Perrin and his two daughters, Louise and
Eugenie, had taken refuge in a stable. The soldiers entered, and one
of them, seeing young Louise, fired a shot point-blank at her head.
Eugenie succeeded in escaping, but her father was arrested as he fled,
placed among the victims who were being taken to La Prele and shot
with them.
M. Yong, who was going out to exercise his horse, was struck down
before his own house. The Germans in their fury killed the horse after
the master, and set fire to the house. Some others raised the
trap-door of a cellar in which several people were hidden and fired
several shots at them. Mme. Denis Bernard and the boy, Parmentier, 7
years of age, were wounded.
At 5 in the evening Mme. Rozier heard an imploring voice crying,
"Mercy! Mercy!" These cries came from one of two neighboring barns
belonging to MM. Poinsard and Barbier. A man who was acting as
interpreter to the Germans declared to a certain Mme. Thiebaut that
the Germans boasted that they had burned alive in one of these barns,
in spite of his entreaties and appeals to their pity, a man who was
the father of five children. This declaration carries all the more
conviction, since the remains of a burned human body have been found
in the barn belonging to Poinsard.
Side by side with this carnage, innum
|