The outrages at Langeviller and another locality are put on record in an unsigned notebook of a soldier of the 11th Battalion of Pioneers. “Langeviller, 22nd August, a village demolished by the 11th Battalion of Pioneers. _Three women hanged on trees_: the first dead whom I had seen.” Why were these women hanged? We are not told. Eight days afterwards, he continues, “We destroyed eight houses. In a single one of them two men and their wives and a young girl of eighteen had been bayoneted. I was almost moved at the sight of the little one, _her look was so full of innocence_. But an excited body of men could no longer be kept in check, for at such moments we are no longer men, but beasts.” Here, we see, full confession is made. Another notes that at Orchies “a woman had a military execution.” Why? For not having obeyed the command to “halt.” Something even of the acts of violence runs through these confessions. A soldier of the 12th infantry reserve, 3rd corps, writes, “I am forced to note one fact which cannot be due to accident, but there are, even in our army, some … who are no longer men, some … to whom nothing is sacred. Last night a man of the Landwehr, more than thirty-five years old, wanted to violate the daughter of the house on which he quartered himself, a mere little girl, and when her father intervened he pointed his bayonet against the man’s chest.” CHAPTER XII OFFENCES AGAINST CHILDREN, OLD PEOPLE AND PRIESTS The plea of reprisals is no more valid in the case of children, old people and priests than it is in the case of women. All these classes of people have a right to consideration and to absolute respect from the invader. Every crime committed against them can bear no other name than wanton cruelty. In the foregoing pages we have seen how children were killed with their mothers, and old women were outraged and killed. We must now unfold the chapter of crimes against the weak and against those whose character should have saved them from the violences of war. Ill-treatment, imprisonment, wounds, murder, torture—all these we hardly like to think that children, the personification of weakness and innocence, have had to suffer. Such has been the cruelty of the German troops in the field, that what has moved all men’s interest and compassion has, in several cases, only urged them on the more readily to violence. BELGIAN AND FRENCH CHILDREN ILL-TREATED, WOUNDED AND KILLED We have already told the story of the ill-treatment to which six to eight thousand people, who were packed together standing in the riding-school and had to pass the night there, were exposed at Louvain. A number of children were included in these. Several endured great hardships, and the youngest died in their mothers’ arms. At Dinant, in the slaughter which took place, several children were massacred.