The unhappy man asserted in a loud voice that he was innocent, but got the answer that he would have to prove that later on. But he never had a chance of doing that. Arriving at the market-place, he and three others were simply placed against the wall and shot. He could not even have spiritual assistance. Frequently Protestant services were held in the market-place, conducted by a parson, and the invariable beginning and end of that parson's allocution was: "There is one God; there must also be one Kaiser." A good many lads had been able to escape from Bilsen and the environs to Antwerp; in the aggregate, 500 from this district, and more went every day. They were driven to the Belgian army by all they had seen and experienced. Often one heard women and girls say: "Oh, if I were a man, if I were a boy, I should be in the army to-morrow!" I was sitting comfortably in the home circle of the editor of _De Bilsenaar_, with father, mother, and daughter. They had one son of eighteen, who was at the Junior Seminary at Hasselt, and only the first Sunday in August he had left for Heerenth in order to offer himself as a missionary aspirant. The next Wednesday the would-be missionary, an only son, enlisted as a volunteer in the Belgian army.... He was already the sixteenth of his form of twenty-three boys at the college at Hasselt. The father got up and went to a small cupboard from which he took some papers, and his eyes, and those of his wife and daughter, became moist at once; letters from their only boy, written on the battle-field! He read them out with a broken voice, frequently interrupted by sobs. I said nothing, could not utter a word. The boy also had been obliged to retire into France, had been transported from Rheims to Havre, and from there, across the sea, back to Belgium. "Five times already, my dear parents, I have been in the fight; I have asked them not to let me wait long for the sixth. Oh, you cannot imagine how glorious it is to be allowed to fight for my country! Have confidence in the future, dear parents, and say a paternoster for me and my comrades and also one for our Fatherland." Well, I could not keep calm when I heard such things read by a father from a letter of his only son on the battle-field; that is impossible.