We felt quite at ease with the artillery, and were still passably fresh when we halted at six o'clock in the morning, though we had been marching since two o'clock. Near our halting place we found a broken German howitzer, and next to it two dead soldiers. When firing, a shell had burst in the gun destroying it entirely. Two men of the crew had been killed instantly and some had been seriously wounded by the flying pieces. We utilized the pause to bury the two dead men, put both of them in one grave, placed both their helmets on the grave, and wrote on a board: "Here rest two German Artillerymen." We had to proceed, and soon reached the town of Bertrix. Some few houses to the left and right of the road were burning fiercely; we soon got to know that they had been set alight because soldiers marching past were said to have been shot at from those houses. Before one of these houses a man and his wife and their son, a boy of 15 or 16, lay half burnt to cinders; all had been covered with straw. Three more civilians lay dead in the same street. We had marched past some more houses when all at once shots rang out; they had been shooting from some house, and four of our soldiers had been wounded. For a short while there was confusion. The house from which the shots must have come was soon surrounded, and hand grenades were thrown through all the windows into the interior. In an instant all the rooms were in flames. The exploding hand grenades caused such an enormous air pressure that all the doors were blown from their hinges and the inner walls torn to shreds. Almost at the same time, five men in civilian clothes rushed into the street and asked for quarter with uplifted hands. They were seized immediately and taken to the officers, who formed themselves into a tribunal within a few minutes. Ten minutes later sentence had already been executed; five strong men lay on the ground, blindfolded and their bodies riddled by bullets.