The Germans marched into _Aerschot_[86] on the morning of Aug. 19th, driving before them two girls and four women with babies in their arms as a screen.[87] One of the women was wounded by the fire of the Belgian troops, who had posted machine guns to dispute the Germans’ entry, but now withheld their fire and retired from the town. The Germans encountered no further resistance, but they began to kill civilians and break into houses immediately they came in. They bayonetted two women on their doorstep (c 27). They shot a deaf boy (c 1) who did not understand the order to raise his hands. They shot 5 men they had requisitioned as guides (R. No. 3). They fired at the church (c 18). They fired at people looking out of the windows of their houses (R. No. 5). The Burgomaster’s son, a boy of fifteen, was standing at a window with his mother and was wounded by a bullet in the leg (R. No. 11). They killed people in their houses. Six men, for instance, were bayonetted in one house (R. No. 15). They dragged a railway employé from his home and shot him in a field (R. No. 2). “I went back home,” states a woman who had been seized by the Germans and had escaped (c 18), “and found my husband lying dead outside it. He had been shot through the head from behind. His pockets had been rifled.” Other civilians (the civil population was already accused of having fired) were collected as hostages,[88] and driven, with their hands raised above their heads, to an open space on the banks of the River Démer. “There were about 200 prisoners, some of them invalids taken from their beds” (c 1). There was a professor from the College among them (R. No. 9), and an old man of 75 (c 15). After these hostages had been searched, and had been kept standing by the river, with their arms up, for two hours, the Burgomaster was brought to them under guard,[89] and compelled to read out a proclamation, ordering all arms to be given up, and warning that if a shot were fired by a civilian, the man who fired it, and four others with him, would be put to death. It was a gratuitous proceeding, for, several days before the Germans arrived, the Burgomaster (like most of his colleagues throughout Belgium) had sent the town crier round, calling on the population to deposit all arms at the Hôtel-de-Ville, and he had posted placards on the walls to the same effect (c 4, 7). A priest drew a German officer’s attention to these placards (c 20), and the Burgomaster himself had already given a translation of their contents to the German commandant (R. No. 11). That officer[90] disingenuously represents this act of good faith as a suspicious circumstance. “To my special surprise,” he states, “thirty-six more rifles, professedly intended for public processions and for the Garde Civique, were produced” (from the Hôtel-de-Ville). “The constituents of ammunition for these rifles were also found packed in a case.” But the only weapon still found in private hands on the morning of Aug.