It is said that more civilians than soldiers have fallen in Belgium. Peruse the horrible accounts taken by the Belgian Commission, who took evidence in the most careful and conscientious fashion. Study the accounts of that dreadful night in Louvain which can only be equalled by the Spanish Fury of Antwerp. Read the account of the wife of the burgomaster of Aerschott, with its heart-rending description of how her lame son, aged sixteen, was kicked along to his death by an aide-de-camp. It is all so vile, so brutally murderous that one can hardly realise that one is reading the incidents of a modern campaign conducted by one of the leading nations in Europe. Do you imagine that the thing has been exaggerated? Far from it--the volume of crime has not yet been appreciated. Have not many Germans unwittingly testified to what they have seen and done? Only last week we had the journal of one of them, an officer whose service had been almost entirely in France and removed from the crime centres of Belgium. Yet were ever such entries in the diary of a civilised soldier? "Our men behaved like regular Vandals." "We shot the whole lot" (these were villagers). "They were drawn up in three ranks. The same shot did for three at a time." "In the evening we set fire to the village. The priest and some of the inhabitants were shot." "The villages all round were burning." "The villages were burned and the inhabitants shot." "At Leppe apparently two hundred men were shot. There must have been some innocent men among them." "In the future we shall have to hold an inquiry into their guilt instead of merely shooting them." "The Vandals themselves could not have done more damage. The place is a disgrace to our army." So the journal runs on with its tale of infamy. It is an infamy so shameless that even in the German record the story is perpetuated of how a French lad was murdered because he refused to answer certain questions. To such a depth of degradation has Prussia brought the standard of warfare. And now, as the appetite for blood grows ever stronger--and nothing waxes more fast--we have stories of the treatment of prisoners. Here is a point where our attention should be most concentrated and our action most prompt. It is the just duty which we owe to our own brave soldiers. At present the instances are isolated, and we will hope that they do not represent any general condition. But the stories come from sure sources. There is the account of the brutality which culminated in the death of the gallant motor-cyclist Pearson, the son of Lord Cowdray. There is the horrible story in a responsible Dutch paper, told by an eye-witness, of the torture of three British wounded prisoners in Landen Station on October 9.