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THE Belgian government published last year a Reply to the German White Book of 10 May 1915.
This reply gives peremptory and categorical denials to all the allegations in the White Book on the subject of francs-tireurs, of attacks by civilians and of the Belgian women’s cruelty to the German prisoners and wounded. It contains a body of authentic and overwhelming evidence upon the massacres at Andenne, Dinant, Louvain and Aerschot which enables history here and now to pronounce its verdict with even greater certainty than the most scrupulous jury of a criminal court.
Among the most frightful incidents reported in these accounts by eye-witnesses, I would linger to-day upon only two of those which marked the sack of Aerschot; not that they are more odious or cruel than the others—on the contrary, beside the unprovoked murders and wholesale executions at Andenne, Dinant and Louvain, which are of unsurpassable horror, they seem almost kindly—but I select them for the very reason that they display more clearly than in its most violent excesses what we may call the normal mentality of the German army and the abominable things which it did when it believed itself to be acting with justice, moderation and humanity. I select them above all because they show us the admirable and touching state of mind, as displayed amidst a terrible ordeal, of a little Belgian city, the most innocent of all the victims of this war, and offer for our contemplation instances of simple and heroic self-sacrifice which have escaped notice and which it is well to bring to light, for they are as beautiful as the most splendid examples in the fairest pages of Plutarch.