"About 5 o'clock in the evening, he saw the Germans bringing out all the young and middle-aged men from the cells, and ranging their prisoners, to the number of forty, in three rows in the middle of the courtyard. About twenty Germans were drawn up opposite, but before anything was done there was a tremendous fusillade from some point near the prison and the civilians were hurried back to their cells. Half an hour later the same forty men were brought back into the courtyard. Almost immediately there was a second fusillade and they were driven back to the cells again. "About 7 o'clock the witness and other prisoners were brought out of their cells and marched out of the prison. They went between two lines of troops to Roche Bayard, about a kilometer away. An hour later the women and children were separated and the prisoners were brought back to Dinant passing the prison on their way. Just outside the prison, the witness saw three lines of bodies which he recognized as being those of his neighbors. They were nearly all dead, but he noticed movement in some of them. There were about one hundred and twenty bodies. The prisoners were then taken up to the top of a hill outside Dinant and compelled to stay there till 8 o'clock in the morning. On the following day they were put into cattle trucks and taken thence to Coblenz. For three months they remained prisoners in Germany. "Unarmed civilians were killed in masses at other places near the prison. About ninety bodies were seen lying on the top of one another in a grass square opposite the convent. A witness asked a German officer why her husband had been shot, and he told her that it was because two of her sons had been in the civil guard and had shot at the Germans. As a matter of fact, one of her sons was at that time in Liege and the other in Brussels. It is stated that besides the ninety corpses referred to above, sixty corpses of civilians were recovered from a hole in the brewery yard and that forty-eight bodies of women and children were found in a garden. The town was systematically set on fire by hand grenades. Another witness saw a little girl of seven, one of whose legs was broken and the other injured by a bayonet. We have no reason to believe that the civilian population of Dinant gave any provocation, or that any other defense can be put forward to justify the treatment inflicted upon its citizens." The Bryce Commission reports the outrages in a number of Belgian villages in this terse fashion: