"_The rage, the terror, and despair excited by this measure all over Belgium were beyond anything we had witnessed since the day the Germans poured into Brussels. The delegates of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, returning to Brussels, told the most distressing stories of the scenes of cruelty and sorrow attending the seizures. And daily, hourly almost, since that time appalling stories have been related by Belgians coming to the Legation. It is impossible for us to verify them, first, because it is necessary for us to exercise all possible tact in dealing with the subject at all, and secondly because there is no means of communication between the Occupations-Gebiet and the Etappen-Gebiet. Transportation everywhere in Belgium is difficult, the vicinal railways scarcely operating any more because of the lack of oil, while all the horses have been taken. The people who are forced to go from one village to another must do so on foot or in vans drawn by the few miserable horses that are left. The wagons of the breweries, the one institution that the Germans have scrupulously respected, are hauled by oxen._ [Sidenote: A foul deed.] "_The well-known tendency of sensational reports to exaggerate themselves, especially in time of war, and in a situation like that existing here, with no newspapers to serve as a daily clearing house for all the rumours that are as avidly believed as they are eagerly repeated, should of course be considered; but even if a modicum of all that is told is true there still remains enough to stamp this deed as one of the foulest that history records._ "_I am constantly in receipt of reports from all over Belgium that tend to bear out the stories one constantly hears of brutality and cruelty. A number of men sent back to Mons are said to be in a dying condition, many of them tubercular. At Malines and at Antwerp returned men have died, their friends asserting that they have been victims of neglect and cruelty, of cold, of exposure, of hunger._" (Continued on page 74.) A vivid sketch of the deportations from Mons, drawn by a participant, may well be cited here: [Sidenote: "The woes of slavery."] "I will take the 18th of November of last year [1916]. A week or so before that a placard was placed on the walls telling my capital city of Mons that in seven days all the men of that city who were not clergymen, who were not priests, who did not belong to the city council, would be deported. "At half past five, in the gray of the morning on the 18th of November, they walked out, six thousand two hundred men at Mons, myself and another leading them down the cobblestones of the street and out where the rioting would be less than in the great city, with the soldiers on each side, with bayonets fixed, with the women held back.