The German soldier, Karl Johann Kaltendshner, Ninth Company of the Regiment of Count Bülow Tervuenwist, who deserted and fled to Holland, and whose statements in the _Telegraaf_ we have already quoted, tells the following story: “I have seen children in tears, clinging to their defenceless mothers’ skirts, coming out of a threshing-mill where they had sought shelter, and _I have seen how these mothers and their children were killed in cowardly and cold-blooded fashion_. Although we were compelled, under penalty of death, to obey all the orders of our officers, _I have seen some of my companions who joyfully performed their melancholy work of massacre. At a certain moment I was myself required to shoot two boys, aged fifteen and twelve years old respectively_, whose father had already been killed. I had not the heart to do it, and I had lowered my arm, expecting to be executed myself, when one of my comrades, jeering at my sentimentality, saved me by pushing me aside and himself firing on the two children. _The eldest fell stark dead, and the second, who got a bullet in the back, was dispatched with a revolver shot_” (_Temps_, 3rd January, 1915). OUTRAGES ON OLD PEOPLE At every place where the civil population was brutally treated, outraged or shot _en masse_—at Louvain, at Dinant—no exception was made in the case of old folk. People of seventy and eighty years of age had to bear forced marches, to remain standing in packed masses, where they were kept for whole nights, at the risk of death, as was the result for a large number. But, in addition to these common instances, outrages of a peculiar kind are not wanting. At Rebais-en-Brie an old man of sixty-nine years old, Auguste Griffaut, was struck with blows of the fist on the head, and finally wounded by a revolver shot. At Sablonnières another old man of the same name, Jules Griffaut, aged sixty-six, was tending his cows in an enclosed field when a German soldier, who was at the rear of a column, fired on him. In Belgium an old man of seventy years, formerly steward to M. Davignon, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Belgium, was shot by the Germans because to the first question that the latter put to him he replied that he was deaf, which was true. Another was shot without mercy at Montmirail because he tried to protect a widow, named Naudé, who was in danger of being outraged by a non-commissioned officer.