“Not less than ourselves must the students, the gallery directors, the art historians of Germany suffer, compelled as they are to look on helpless at this incredible act of sacrilege. It is they, indeed, who have most contributed to place before the world in their right perspective, to estimate at their true value the greatest examples of Netherlandish art in its early prime. It is their galleries which contain the most complete collections of these early Netherlandish masters. We challenge them to defy in this, if in this only, the ‘mailed fist’--to come forward and register their solemn protest against the greatest outrage upon civilisation, upon humanity, that the modern world has been called upon to witness.” [H] Several German medical men of eminence, among them Dr. Moll, were alleged to have offered this suggestion. On the other hand, Dr. Kaufman, of Aix-la-Chapelle, in a letter to the _Kölnische Volkszeitung_, says that tales of German soldiers mutilated by Belgians--tales the circulation of which was officially countenanced--spread like wildfire among the soldiers, and a single case of a man being mutilated by a shell was magnified into an outrage, and this was only one of a hundred similar instances. The soldiers, by auto-suggestion, got to believe their own wild fancies, and by propagating their stories caused a most dangerous state of anger and exasperation in the German Army. At Huy, a German non-commissioned officer and a private had been wounded by shots. On the assertion that the shots had been fired by inhabitants the German commander, Major von Baschuitch, ordered a number of houses to be burned. The burgomaster, however, persuaded him to hold an inquiry. This proved that the shots had been fired by German soldiers in a drunken panic. [I] Shortly before this atrocity, a proclamation had been issued at Liége ordering the citizens to raise their hats to German officers in the street, and to salute men of the rank and file. It was notified that if this command was not obeyed, the German soldiery were authorised to enforce “due respect.” Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected. Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed. The illustrations are maps. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hacking Through Belgium, by Edmund Dane