“At Sermaize, the roadmaker, Brocard, was placed among a number of hostages. Just at the moment when he was being arrested with his son, his wife and his daughter-in-law in a state of panic rushed to throw themselves into the Saulx. The old man was able to free himself for a moment and ran in all haste after them and made several attempts to save them, but the Germans dragged him away pitilessly, leaving the two wretched women struggling in the river. When Brocard and his son were restored to liberty, four days afterward, and found the bodies, they discovered that their wives had both received bullet wounds in the head. [Illustration: © _Underwood and Underwood, N. Y._ THE SUPREME EXPONENTS OF GERMAN FRIGHTFULNESS On the left, General von Bissing, military commander of Belgium. On the right, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, who inspired the German submarine campaign.] “At Triaucourt the Germans gave themselves up to the worst excesses. Angered doubtless by the remark which an officer had addressed to a soldier, against whom a young girl of nineteen, Mlle. Helene Proces, had made complaint on account of the indecent treatment to which she had been subjected, they burned the village and made a systematic massacre of the inhabitants. They began by setting fire to the house of an inoffensive householder, M. Jules Gand, and by shooting this unfortunate man as he was leaving his house to escape the flames. Then they dispersed among the houses in the streets, firing off their rifles on every side. A young man, seventeen years, Georges Lecourtier, who tried to escape was shot. M. Alfred Lallemand suffered the same fate. He was pursued into the kitchen of his fellow-citizen Tautelier, and murdered there, while Tautelier received three bullets in his hand. “Fearing, not without reason, for their lives, Mlle. Proces, her mother and her grandmother of seventy-one and her old aunt of eighty-one, tried to cross the trellis which separates their garden from a neighboring property with the help of a ladder. The young girl alone was able to reach the other side and to avoid death by hiding in the cabbages. As for the other women, they were struck down by rifle shots. The village curé collected the brains of the aunt on the ground on which they were strewn and had the bodies carried into Proces’ house. During the following night, the Germans played the piano near the bodies. “While the carnage raged, the fire rapidly spread and devoured thirty-five houses. An old man of seventy and a child of two months perished in the flames. M. Igier, who was trying to save his cattle, was pursued for 300 meters by soldiers, who fired at him ceaselessly. By a miracle this man had the good fortune not to be wounded, but five bullets went through his clothing.”