The Germans have endeavoured to justify their brutal excesses by bringing counter-charges against Belgian civilians. For instance, the Chancellor of the German Empire, in a communication made to the press on September 2, 1914, and printed in the _Nord Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_, of September 21, said: "Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the German wounded. Officials of Belgian cities have invited our officers to dinner, and shot and killed them across the table. Contrary to all international law, the whole civilian population of Belgium was called out, and after having at first shown friendliness carried on in the rear of our troops terrible warfare with concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes while they were sleeping." Upon this Lord Bryce's Committee make the comment: "No evidence whatever seems to have been adduced to prove these tales."[110] Of both individual and concerted acts of barbarity, the report teems--for example:--[111] "It is clearly shown that many offences were committed against infants and quite young children. On one occasion children were even roped together and used as a military screen against the enemy, on another three soldiers went into action carrying small children to protect themselves from flank fire. A shocking case of the murder of a baby by a drunken soldier at Malines is thus recorded by one eye-witness and confirmed by another:-- "'One day when the Germans were not actually bombarding the town I left my house to go to my mother's house in High Street. My husband was with me. I saw eight German soldiers, and they were drunk. They were singing and making a lot of noise and dancing about. As the German soldiers came along the street I saw a small child, whether boy or girl I could not see, come out of a house. The child was about two years of age. The child came into the middle of the street so as to be in the way of the soldiers. The soldiers were walking in twos. The first line of two passed the child; one of the second line, the man on the left, stepped aside and drove his bayonet with both hands into the child's stomach, lifting the child into the air on his bayonet and carrying it away on his bayonet, he and his comrades still singing. The child screamed when the soldier struck it with his bayonet, but not afterwards.'"[112] The following brief extracts of German atrocities are taken from Official Reports issued by the Belgian Legation:--[113]