On the following
day they were put into cattle trucks and taken thence to Coblenz. For
three months they remained prisoners in Germany.
"Unarmed civilians were killed in masses at other places near the
prison. About ninety bodies were seen lying on the top of one another in
a grass square opposite the convent. A witness asked a German officer
why her husband had been shot, and he told her that it was because two
of her sons had been in the civil guard and had shot at the Germans. As
a matter of fact, one of her sons was at that time in Liege and the
other in Brussels. It is stated that besides the ninety corpses referred
to above, sixty corpses of civilians were recovered from a hole in the
brewery yard and that forty-eight bodies of women and children were
found in a garden. The town was systematically set on fire by hand
grenades. Another witness saw a little girl of seven, one of whose legs
was broken and the other injured by a bayonet. We have no reason to
believe that the civilian population of Dinant gave any provocation, or
that any other defense can be put forward to justify the treatment
inflicted upon its citizens."
The Bryce Commission reports the outrages in a number of Belgian
villages in this terse fashion:
"In Hofstade a number of houses had been set on fire and many corpses
were seen, some in houses, some in back yards, and some in the streets.
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