In _Malines_ itself[115] they destroyed 1,500 houses from first to last, and revenged themselves atrociously on the civil population. A Belgian soldier saw them bayonet an old woman in the back, and cut off a young woman’s breasts (d 1). Another saw them bayonet a woman and her son (d 2). They shot a police inspector in the stomach as he came out of his door, and blew off the head of an old woman at a window (d 3). A child of two came out into the street as eight drunken soldiers were marching by. “A man in the second file stepped aside and drove his bayonet with both hands into the child’s stomach. He lifted the child into the air on his bayonet and carried it away, he and his comrades still singing. The child screamed when the soldier struck it with his bayonet, but not afterwards.” This incident is reported by two witnesses (d 4-5). Another woman was found dead with twelve bayonet wounds between her shoulders and her waist (d 7). Another--between 16 and 20 years old--who had been killed by a bayonet, “was kneeling, and her hands were clasped, and the bayonet had pierced both hands. I also saw a boy of about 16,” continues the witness, “who had been killed by a bayonet thrust through his mouth.” In the same house there was an old woman lying dead (d 9). The next place from which the Germans were driven was _Hofstade_,[116] and here, too, they revenged themselves before they went. They left the corpses of women lying in the streets. There was an old woman mutilated with the bayonet.[117] There was a young pregnant woman who had been ripped open.[118] In the lodge of a chateau the porter’s body was found lying on a heap of straw.[119] He had been bayonetted in the stomach--evidently while in bed, for the empty bed was soaked with blood. The blacksmith of Hofstade--also bayonetted in the stomach--was lying on his doorstep.[120] Adjoining the blacksmith’s house there was a café, and here a middle-aged woman lay dead, and a boy of about 16. The boy was found kneeling in an attitude of supplication. Both his hands had been cut off. “One was on the ground, the other hanging by a bit of skin” (d 25). His face was smeared with blood. He was seen in this condition by twenty-five separate witnesses, whose testimony is recorded in the Bryce Report.[121] Several saw him before he was quite dead. In one house at Hofstade[122] the Belgian troops found the dead bodies of two women and a man. One of the women, who was middle-aged, had been bayonetted in the stomach; the other, who was about 20 years old, had been bayonetted in the head, and her legs had been almost severed from her body. The man had been bayonetted through the head. In another room the body of a ten-year-old boy was suspended from a hanging lamp. He had been killed first by a bayonet wound in the stomach.