On August 19th Aerschot, in North Brabant, with about five thousand inhabitants, was, as already reported, destroyed. It appears that during the three days the German soldiery massacred and pillaged the town, which had not resisted, although there was no military force there whatever. In the neighbouring village of Diest many of the inhabitants were put to the sword. The wife of Francis Luyckx, aged forty-five, and her daughter, twelve years of age, had, in their terror, taken refuge in a sewer. They were discovered, dragged out, and shot. The little daughter of Jean Oyyen, a pretty child of nine, was shot, and a man named Andre Willem, aged twenty-three, the village sexton, was bound to a tree and burned alive. In the village of Schaffen, near Diest, two men, named Lodts and Marken, both aged forty, were captured and entombed. When exhumed, it was found that they had been buried alive, head downwards. These occurrences--which are only a few of a very long list--had been fully inquired into, and confirmed by the committee of investigation, which was composed of the highest magistrates of Belgium and the chief professors of the Universities. Statements were made that aged villagers in many places on the Franco-German frontier were hanged to trees; others, after being killed, had their eyes gouged out. In one place fifteen bodies were found mutilated in a heap, and along the whole frontier from Luxemburg to Basle outrages were committed on women, girls, and children. Mlle. Marie Malet, the daughter of a judicial official in Brussels, who had been sent to London with a party of Belgian girls for safety, stated that she had seen a little girl, a friend of hers, aged ten, savagely sabred by a German officer, merely because she made a remark that the Germans were bullies. The child died an hour afterwards. Mlle. Malet stated that she had been sent from near Brussels with her sister, owing to the insults to which Belgian girls were subjected by German soldiers. Her mother had been wounded and her home looted of food and valuables. [Illustration: BELGIAN PEASANTS WATCHING THE DESTRUCTION OF THEIR HOMES BY THE RUTHLESS INVADER. _Photo, Daily Mirror._]