They were drunken soldiers who provoked the burning of Huy, the assassinations at Canne (_N.R.C._, 23rd August, 1914, morning edition), and in part at least the massacres of Louvain. When they occupied Gand the police had to collect them, dead-drunk, on the very first morning; they had already begun to fire revolver-shots. It was after a tavern brawl between drunken soldiers that the burning of a portion of Tongres was decreed (_N.R.C._, 22nd August, 1914, morning edition). In Brussels, on the 28th September, 1914, some drunken soldiers in a German cabaret situated in the Rue de la Grande Ile, were firing rifle-shots to amuse themselves; bullets lodged in the house-fronts opposite. The officer whom some one went to fetch that he might witness this misbehaviour believed that an attack was being delivered by "francs-tireurs," and, trembling like a leaf, refused to go thither. The _N.R.C._, 28th January, 1915 (morning edition) states that a young girl of Eelen was arrested as a "franc-tireur" because rifle-shots had been fired by drunken soldiers. Let us add that drunkenness might have had harmless consequences if the authorities had not exerted themselves to make the troops believe that every unexpected shot is necessarily fired by a "franc-tireur," and that so black a crime can only be paid for by a general massacre accompanied by the burning of the village concerned. * * * * * There is only one fashion of explaining the horrors committed by the Germans: it is to admit that they are modelled beforehand according to a carefully devised system of intimidation: the systematic inhumanity of their treatment of the enemy population being intended to facilitate other military operations. _Cruelties necessary according to German Theories._