At Senlis, Department of Oise, on September 2, 1914, French captives were made to walk in the open so as to be hit by French bullets. Many were killed and wounded. The townsman on the left was struck in the knee. A German officer asked to see the wound and shot him through the shoulder. On the right a German officer is seen torturing a wounded French soldier by beating him in the face with a stick.] Under date of September 12, 1917, Minister Whitlock, in a report to the State Department of the United States, made the following summary: “As one studies the evidence at hand, one is struck at the outset by the fact so general that it must exclude the hypothesis of coincidence, and that is that these wholesale massacres followed immediately upon some check, some reverse, that the German army had sustained. The German army was checked by the guns of the forts to the east of Liége, and the horrors of Vise, Verviers, Bligny, Battice, Hervy and twenty villages follow. When they entered Liége, they burned the houses along two streets and killed many persons, five or six Spaniards among them. Checked before Namur they sacked Andenne, Bauvignies, and Champignon, and when they took Namur they burned one hundred and fifty houses. Compelled to give battle to the French army in the Belgian Ardennes they ravaged the beautiful valley of the Semois; the complete destruction of the village of Rossignlo and the extermination of its entire male population took place there. Checked again by the French on the Meuse, the awful carnage of Dinant results. Held on the Sambre by the French, they burn one hundred houses at Charleroi and enact the appalling tragedy of Tamines. At Mons, the English hold them, and after that all over the Borinage there is a systematic destruction, pillage and murder. The Belgian army drive them back from Malines and Louvain is doomed. The Belgian army falling back and fighting in retreat took refuge in the forts of Antwerp, and the burning and sack of Hougaerde, Wavre, Ottignies, Grimde, Neerlinter, Weert, St. George, Shaffen and Aerschot follow. “The Belgian troops inflicted serious losses on the Germans in the South of the Province of Limbourg and the towns of Lummen, Bilsen, and Lanaeken are partially destroyed. Antwerp held out for two months, and all about its outer line of fortifications there was blood and fire, numerous villages were sacked and burned and the whole town of Termonde was destroyed. During the battles of September the village of Boortmeerbeek near Malines, occupied by the Germans, was retaken by the Belgians, and when the Germans entered it again they burned forty houses. Three times occupied by the Belgians and retaken by the Germans Boortmeerbeek was three times punished in the same way. That is to say, everywhere the German army met with a defeat it took it out, as we say in America, on the civil population. And that is the explanation of the German atrocities in Belgium.”