To force those about to be shot to dig their own graves, as they did at Tavigny,[49] is quite a commonplace method. In the Fonds de Leffe, on the 23rd August, 1914 (p. 360), they perfected their mode of operation. They had called up eight men of Dinant to bury the victims as they were shot (there was so much work to do that it had to be entrusted to experienced hands). In the evening each of the gravediggers dug his own grave; four were shot, and buried by their colleagues; just as these were about to suffer the same fate an officer "pardoned" them: not out of humanity (that would have been too decent), but simply because their services would be required during the following days. At Dinant, during the bloody days of the 23rd and 24th August, they invented many other moral tortures. On the morning of the 23rd they shot, in a meadow of the Fonds de Leffe, a group of thirteen men. But instead of leading them all together before the firing platoon, they cunningly prolonged their pleasure; the thirteen unfortunates were tied, in succession, to the same tree, and shot down one by one. The whole of the 23rd was consecrated, in the Fonds de Leffe, to killing the men in small batches of half a dozen; these were shot either before their wives and children, or at a short distance, but within earshot, so that the family should lose none of the groans of the dying. When, later on, the women and children were shut up in a windmill, having first been marched in front of the corpses, the Germans allowed themselves the distraction of lighting fires before the windows from time to time, in order to make the women believe that they were about to be burned alive with their children, and to delight in their anguish. While men were being shot in the Fonds de Leffe, horrible massacres were being committed at Leffe and at Dinant, at only a few minutes' distance. Here, too, men were shot before their families--for example, Victor Poncelet and Charles Naus--and the survivors were forced to pass through the midst of the corpses. The officers, too, devised more complicated diversions; for instance, allowing a group of women and children to escape into the mountains, in order to shoot them down from a distance. A moral torture commonly employed is that which consists in making people believe that they are going to be killed. All the inhabitants of Sorinnes were placed before machine-guns, and a German chaplain, speaking French, ceremoniously shook each man by the hand. At Dinant two or three hundred persons were lined up against a wall; then a pastor recited the prayers for the dead (perhaps the chaplain of Sorinnes had found another opportunity for his pleasantry), and an empty machine-gun was pointed at them. An officer laughed as though his sides would split while he threatened, with his revolver, some fifteen women shut up in the convent of Prémontré, at Leffe.