In the performance of these abominable acts the Germans showed no trace of humanity. Their thoughts were incapable of going back to themselves and their fatherland, to the daughters, the fiancées, the wives, the mothers whom they themselves had left at home; wholesale murders, mutilations, tortures, treatment so frightful as to drive the victims crazy, refinements of cruelty by which the relatives and parents of the latter were made partners in their punishment, and in which, as we have seen, neither organisation nor method was wanting—such are the acts of which we are about to give proofs and examples. MURDERS In the story of the murders committed by the Germans, of which women have been the victims, we see almost always that these were surprised in the midst of their common daily tasks. The horror of the crime committed against them is enhanced. It is still worse when the massacred women were about to perform some act of charity. At Tamines, in Belgium, a woman was killed in the middle of the street as she was carrying a sick old man. At Mayen-Multien a woman named Laforest was seriously wounded, in the beginning of September, by a German horseman to whom she and her husband had been obliged to give hospitality. His excuse was that they were too long about serving him. At Hazebrouck, in the middle of the month of October, a German soldier, who was riding a bicycle, seeing in a corner a poor mother seated with her child sleeping on her knees, transfixed the latter with his bayonet, and at the same time wounded the mother in the thigh, without any of his comrades interfering. At Audun-le-Roman, Mlle. Tréfel was struck at the very moment when she was giving a drink to a German soldier. Examples of such acts are innumerable. The most striking instances were those which took place at Malines, Gerbeviller, Audun-le-Roman, Boortmeerbeck, Neuville-en-Artois, Hériménil. At Hériménil, Mme. Truger, twenty-three years old, was shot by order of an officer. At Boortemeerbeck, the maid-servant of Mlle. van Hoorde was killed because she was accused of having assassinated an officer. This officer had committed suicide, after leaving on his table a letter in which he declared his intention. At Lunéville a young girl of sixteen years, Mlle. Weill, was killed in her own house by her father’s side.