The evening of the first night of the massacre the police gave to the world the report that a Jew had thrown a bomb into a religious procession, and for the moment the world believed this. As a matter of fact, according to the unanimous testimony of the townspeople, and the report of the investigating committee, no bomb was thrown in the whole town on the day of the religious fête, and no Jew in any way disturbed the procession. This was an out-and-out fabrication of the police who inaugurated the massacre, designed to protect themselves. The first man wounded told me with his own lips what actually transpired. He was standing by the bedside of his wife, who had that hour given birth to a child. Hearing a procession passing the house he stepped to the window to look out. A soldier deliberately raised his rifle and fired at him--the bullet hitting him in the shoulder. That shot was the signal for the beginning of the massacre which continued in the shape of a murderous riot for three days. Not a hand was raised during those three days to put a stop to the deeds of horror, although the governor of the province knew about it and had at his disposal troops sufficient to quell a dozen such affairs. The police led in the massacre, assisted by the flotsam and jetsam of the town known as the Black Hundred, while the military acquiesced by refraining from interference. As I passed one cot in the hospital a voice called to me in broken English: “You speak English?” I turned in surprise and saw a man of about middle age, almost wholly swathed in bandages. “How do you come to know English?” I inquired. “I lived five years in London,” he answered, adding quickly, “Do you want to know what happened to me?” I told him I did. “Well, you see, I had worked hard and saved five hundred rubles ($250.00), and I thought I would take my family to America. I went to Warsaw to buy the tickets. I was coming back with the tickets in my pocket. I got off the train at Bielostok and saw a crowd coming down the street. I did not know what it was, but I was not frightened. Then, all of a sudden, the man with the cross came at me and began to beat me, and that is all I remember.” I wondered what the “man with the cross” could mean, and the hospital surgeon explained that the man who marched before the religious procession carried a gold cross with an image of the crucified Christ upon it, and _that_ sacred symbol was used as a weapon of butchery and death! Among all civilized nations hospitals are respected, even in war times. But the gendarmes stood before the Bielostok hospital and deliberately poured volley after volley into it, with no other object, apparently, than to throw the patients into a panic. Some of them threw themselves under the beds, others climbed up the chimneys. One man remained three days in a chimney, and then dropped down through the exhaustion of hunger.