This was also the case at Courtacon (Seine-et-Marne), where five men and a child of thirteen years, taken as hostages, were exposed to the French fire during an engagement. Another hostage, named Rousseau, a conscript of the 1914 class, arrested in the same commune, was murdered under tragic conditions. Questioned about the military position of this young man, the mayor, who happened to be amongst the hostages, replied that Rousseau had passed the military court, that he had been passed as fit for service, but that his class had not yet been called up. The Germans then made the prisoner undress, in order to discover what was his physical condition, then they put on his trousers again and shot him fifty metres away from his compatriots. HOSTAGES IN SERBIA The hostages taken by the Austrians may be divided into two categories. They were, in the first place, the best-known Serbians, mayors or prominent inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose imprisonment had no other object than to stop the invasion of that province by the threat of shooting them. The second category was composed of peasants, living in Serbian villages, who were shot in order to strike terror into the inhabitants. Amongst the hostages of the first category several were shot. There were amongst them priests, both Orthodox and Catholic, the Mayor of Raguse, M. Tchingrin, the Vice-President of the Municipal Council of this town, Dr. Puglissi, the poet, and the Serbo-Croatian deputy, Tressitch. As for the others, here is the story told by M. Reiss, whom we mentioned above— “A group of hostages of from eight to eighty-two years had been brought to Lechnitza. There were 109 of them. Quite close to the railway station of the place the soldiers dug a pit twenty metres long, three wide and two deep. In front of this grave they placed the group of 109 persons and bound them with ropes round their necks. Then a squadron of infantry took up a position on the slopes of the railway and fired a volley at the peasants. The whole group stumbled into the pit, and the soldiers threw earth upon them without having first made sure that all those who had been shot were dead. It is certain that a large number of victims had not been mortally wounded and even that some of them had not been struck at all. I think I am not mistaken in calculating that fifty per cent. of these poor people were buried alive. “During these proceedings, another group of forty hostages had been brought up. The latter were compelled to be present at the massacre of their fellow-citizens and they were forced to shout, whilst the others were being killed, ‘Long live the Emperor Franz-Joseph.’ “I saw the pit opened into which these wretches fell, and I was able to establish the fact that the number of those who died of suffocation was very large. This huge human bundle was firmly fastened together: no rope had been broken.” DEPORTATION OF CIVILIANS