It was said that Spanish students shot
from the schools in the Rue de la Station, but Father Catala, rector of
the school, affirms that the schools were empty. . . .
"If it was necessary, for whatever reason, to do what was done at Vise,
at Dinant, at Aerschot, at Louvain, and in a hundred other towns that
were sacked, pillaged and burned, where masses were shot down because
civilians had fired on German troops, and if it was necessary to do this
on a scale never before witnessed in history, one might not unreasonably
assume that the alleged firing by civilians was done on a scale, if not
so thoroughly organized, at least somewhat in proportion to the rage of
destruction that punished it. And hence it would seem to be a simple
matter to produce at least convincing evidence that civilians had fired
on the soldiers; but there is no testimony to that effect beyond that of
the soldiers who merely assert it: Man hat geschossen. If there were no
more firing on soldiers by civilians in Belgium than is proved by the
German testimony, it was not enough to justify the burning of the
smallest of the towns that was overtaken by that fate. And there is not
a scintilla of evidence of organized bands of francs-tireurs, such as
were found in the war of 1870."
Under date of September 12, 1917, Minister Whitlock, in a report to the
State Department of the United States, made the following summary: "As
one studies the evidence at hand, one is struck at the outset by the
fact so general that it must exclude the hypothesis of coincidence, and
that is that these wholesale massacres followed immediately upon some
check, some reverse, that the German army had sustained.
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