us.

"They broke open the door of my home," he said, "they seized me and
knocked me down. In front of my door the corpse of a German lay
stretched out. The Germans said to me: 'You are going to pay for that to
us.' A few moments later they gave me a bayonet cut in my leg. They
sprinkled naphtha in my house and set it afire. My son was struck down
in the street and I was marched in front of the German troops. I do not
know even yet the fate of my son."

Gradually as the peasant talked the time of his suffering came on him.
His eyes began to see it again in front of him. They became fixed and
wild, the white of them visible. His voice was shrill and broken with
sobs.

"My boy," he said, "I haven't seen him." His body shook with sobbing.

At my request the young man with me took down the statements of these
two peasants, turning them into French from the Flemish, with the aid of
the priest. In the presence of the priest and one of the sisters the two
peasants signed, each man, his statement, making his mark.

Our group passed into the next room, where the wounded women were
gathered. A sister led us to the bedside of a very old woman, perhaps
eighty years old. She had thin white hair, that straggled across the
pillow. There was no motion to the body, except for faint breathing. She
was cut through the thigh with a bayonet.

I went across the room and found a little girl, twelve years old. She
was propped up in bed and half bent over, as if she had been broken at
the breast bone. Her body whistled with each breath. One of our
ambulance corps went out next day to the hospital--Dr. Donald Renton. He
writes me:

"I went out with Davidson, the American sculptor, and Yates, the cinema
man, and there had been brought into the hospital the previous day the
little girl you speak of. She had a gaping wound on, I think, the right
side of her back, and died the next day."

Dr. Renton's address is 110 Hill Street, Garnet Hill, Glasgow.

The young man who took down the record is named E. de Niemira, a British
subject. He made the report of what we had seen to the Bryce Committee.
These cases which I witnessed appear in the Bryce Report under the
heading of "Alost."[B] Of such is the Bryce Report made: first-hand
witness by men like myself, who know what they know, who are ready for
any test to be applied, who made careful notes, who had witnesses.

"Why do the Germans do these things? It is not war. It is cruel and
wrong," t