The evidence of Belgian officers and soldiers shows that German detachments do not hesitate to display either the white flag or the Red Cross flag in order to approach our troops with impunity. On the other hand, they fire on our ambulances and maltreat the ambulance men. They maltreat and even kill the wounded. The clergy seem to be particularly chosen as subjects for their brutality. Finally, we have in our possession expanding bullets which had been abandoned by the enemy at Werchter, and we possess doctors’ certificates showing that wounds must have been inflicted by bullets of this kind. The documents and evidence on which these conclusions rest will be published in due course. (Signed) The President, COOREMAN. Members of the Commission, COUNT GOBLET D’ALVIELLA, RYCKMANS, STRAUSS, VAN CUTSEM. Secretaries, CHEV. ERNST DE BUNSWYCK, ORTS. “=The report of the Belgian Commission of Inquiry into the German atrocities in Belgium is perhaps the most appalling document that has ever been submitted to civilised man. It reveals a cruelty more perverse than that of the Boxer or Bashi-Bazuk, and it covers the reputation of the German soldiery with eternal shame.... They themselves have transgressed every law of God and man.=” --From the _Daily Mail_. V. Can These Things Be True? Can these cold-blooded deeds of atrocity be true? Is it a fact that they have been proved to the satisfaction of the most exacting critics? Is this “welter of fire, blood, and destruction” to be written finally on the pages of history? I can only say this: 1. These stories came to us first from responsible correspondents of all our leading newspapers, who took them down for the most part at first hand from eye-witnesses and from the poor victims themselves. 2. A committee of eminent lawyers, assisted by the Belgian Minister of Justice, made a searching inquiry, sifting vague reports from actual facts. 3. The evidence of the atrocities thus collected was formulated in an Official Report to be presented to the President of the United States by the Belgian Delegation of Ministers of State, now on their way to America. 4. The British Official Press Bureau issued, on the 25th August, a statement of the representations made to them, which I have already quoted. 5. The Report of the Belgian Government was confirmed by the French protest against German atrocities which was addressed on September 2nd to the Powers by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. 6. Mr. Richard Harding Davis, an eminent American author and correspondent in Belgium of the _New York Tribune_, has entirely confirmed, in cables sent to this leading American journal, things he has seen with his own eyes. 7. I have narrated the information given to me verbally by M. Van der Velde himself. “I myself examined the bodies of a peasant and his son which have been cut to pieces by bayonet thrusts.”