In the villages between Herve and Fort Fléron the slaughter and devastation were, if possible, more complete. At _la Bouxhe-Melen_[22] there were two massacres--one on Aug. 5th and another on the 8th. In the second the people were shot down in a field _en masse_, and 129 were murdered altogether, as well as about 40 people herded in from the farms and hamlets of the neighbourhood. Sixty houses in la Bouxhe-Melen were destroyed. In the commune of _Soumagne_,[23] on a branch road to the south, the Germans killed 165 civilians and burned 104 houses down. When they entered Soumagne on Aug. 5th, they killed indiscriminately in the streets. “They broke the windows and broke the door,” writes a witness (a 5) who had taken refuge in a cellar. “My mother went out of the cellar door.... Then I heard a shot and my mother fell back into the cellar. She was killed.” This indiscriminate killing was followed up the same afternoon by the massacre of 69 civilians in a field called the Fonds Leroy. “The soldiers fired a volley and killed many, and then fired twice more. Then they went through the ranks and bayonetted everyone still living. I saw many bayonetted in this way” (a 4). One boy was shot and bayonetted in four places, and lay several days among the dead, keeping himself alive on weeds and grass. This boy survived. In another field 18 were massacred in one batch, in another 19. “I saw about 20 dead bodies lying here and there along the road,” writes one of the witnesses (a 4). “One of them was that of a little girl aged 13. The rest were men, and most of them had had their heads bashed in.”--“I saw 56 corpses of civilians in a meadow,” deposes another. “Some had been killed by bayonet thrusts and others by rifle shots. In the heaps of corpses above mentioned was that of the son of the Burgomaster. His throat had been cut from ear to ear and his tongue had been pulled out and cut off.”