ight to add that no commissioned officer was present at
the time. At Eppeghem, on August 25th, a pregnant woman who had been
wounded with a bayonet was discovered in the convent. She was dying. On
the road six dead bodies of laborers were seen.

"At Boortmeerbeek a German soldier was seen to fire three times at a
little girl five years old. Having failed to hit her, he subsequently
bayoneted her. He was killed with the butt end of a rifle by a Belgian
soldier who had seen him commit this murder from a distance. 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 eye
witnesses 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. 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 thirty to thirty-five was discovered."

Concerning the treatment of women and children in general, the report
continues: "The evidence shows that the German authorities, when
carrying out a policy of systematic arson and plunder in selected
districts, usually drew some distinction between the adult male
population on the one hand and the women and children on the other. It
was a frequent practice to set apart the adult males of the condemned
district with a view to the execution of a suitable number--preferably
of the younger and more vigorous--and to reserve the women and children
for milder treatment. The depositions, however, present many instances
of calculated cruelty, often going the length of murder, toward the
women and children of the condemned area.

"At Dinant sixty women and children were confined in the cellar of a
convent from Sunday morning till the following Friday, August 28th,
sleeping on the ground, for there were no beds, with nothing to drink
during the whole period, and given no food until Wednesday, when
somebody threw into the cellar two sticks of macaroni and a carrot for
each prisoner. In other cases the women and children were marched for
long distances along roads, as, for instance, the march of the women
from Louvain to Tirlemont, August 28th, the laggards pricked on by the
attendant Uhlans. A lady complains of having been brutally kicked by
privates. Others were struck at with the butt end o