The Germans shouted, “Come out, or we shall burn you alive,” and fired a volley down the steps of the cellar. The soldiers poured petroleum down the cellar and on the mattresses, and set fire to it. The people inside took refuge in the adjoining cellar, and the Guard Champêtre and his wife were the last to leave. From this cellar they finally escaped and fled across the field. The soldiers meanwhile had seized the young seminarist, and another young man, aged twenty, and shot them, declaring that they were of age for military service. [Illustration: THE CHURCH AT TERMONDE IN RUINS. _Photo, Sport and General._ _Face p. 101_] XIII. The Desecration of Churches. Other refugees from Lorraine had harrowing stories to tell of German brutalities, and many made statements which were officially registered. Whole villages, they said, had been put to fire and sword. One man told an official of the Catholic Society that he had, with his own eyes, seen two German soldiers chop off the arms of a child which clung to its mother’s skirts. Other narratives show once more that the Germans entered closed houses and shot or bayoneted the inmates on the pretence that they had been fired upon by them. Miners had in many places been wilfully entombed, and other miners had been forced to dig trenches for the enemy under the threat of being shot. Germans had stabled their horses in churches, which they desecrated, and even covered their animals with priests’ vestments. Under their usual plea the Germans burned the town of Burzweiler, in Alsace-Lorraine, blowing up its factories. An eye-witness, M. Gaudefroy-Demonhynes, who was attempting to return to France from Baden, made a sworn statement to a Paris magistrate, explaining how he had found himself on August 1st detained with other Frenchmen and some Russians at the railway station of Lorrach, in Baden, a few miles from the French frontier. The party were arrested by soldiers and taken to the police station, where they and their luggage were searched. They were then led under guard through the town amid hostile demonstrations by the inhabitants to the square in front of the railway station, where they found another party of about thirty Frenchmen and twenty Russians. One of this party, a French commercial traveller, a stout man aged about forty, suddenly shouted “Vive la France!” Instantly the two soldiers guarding him took him before an officer or a non-commissioned officer, standing a few paces away from a group of officers. People standing between M. Demonhynes and the scene prevented him from hearing what was said, but a few seconds later a shot--only one shot--rang out. “I don’t know who fired,” the witness says, “but I know that just before the report the Frenchman was standing before my eyes against the wall of a restaurant facing the station, held fast by his two guards in the position of one who is about to be executed.