About 400 people lost their lives in this massacre, some on the banks of
the Meuse, where they were shot according to orders given, and some in
the cellars of the houses where they had taken refuge. Eight men
belonging to one family were murdered. Another man was placed close to a
machine gun which was fired through him. His wife brought his body home
on a wheelbarrow. The Germans broke into her house and ransacked it, and
piled up all the eatables in a heap on the floor and relieved themselves
upon it.
A hairdresser was murdered in his kitchen where he was sitting with a
child on each knee. A paralytic was murdered in his garden. After this
came the general sack of the town. Many of the inhabitants who escaped
the massacre were kept as prisoners and compelled to clear the houses of
corpses and bury them in trenches. These prisoners were subsequently
used as a shelter and protection for a pontoon bridge which the Germans
had built across the river, and were so used to prevent the Belgian
forts from firing upon it.
A few days later the Germans celebrated a _Fete Nocturne_ in the square.
Hot wine, looted in the town, was drunk, and the women were compelled to
give three cheers for the Kaiser and to sing "Deutschland ueber Alles.
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