The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-06-24

incidents happened, CT were imagined, by officers and men in state of subconscious fear. There followed the Aerschot affair, the Dinat af- fair, the Louvain affair, and innu merable smaller incidents where whole family was in five minutes eX- tinguished.
 Yet when all is said and done, I am sure that the application of these orders varied with the character of the officer in command. If he were decent fellow, with enough native courage and common sense to keep his head, he might avenge a shot by finding and killing the sniper. and let it go at that. If he were young Prussian officer, deliberately bru- talzed by the system under which he had been trained. he perhaps went the orders one better and added fr1lls of his own.
 As general rule-there were ex- ceptions-the severity of line-offfcers toward Belgian civilians varied in inverse ratio with their ages. Mar ried men with children of their own far enough from military school to have regained their normal human perspective, were always more tol- erant than the youngsters. When our party, prisoners at Louvain. had proved our American citizenship and our moral right to be released, Ma jor Boyer, the adjutant, said: T might let you go through our lines to Brussels at once but you would be in danger. Some of our squiffy young officers might shoot first and look at your papers second"
 Nerves An Untold Factor.
 Along the roads between Louvain and Brussels and between Brussels and Mons. both of which I traversed in the wake of the German army, hundreds of isolated houses burned villages, testified to the thoroughness of the German in his "reprisals." None will ever know how many of these deeds of violence were based upon an actual attack and how many on nerves and imagination. To say that no Belgian ever got his gun and took a shot at the invaders is to pay poor tribute to Belgian spirit. On the other hand, as every soldier knows, guns are always going off ac cidentally around an army. Doubt less many a German detachment entered silent. closed town, the in- habitants COW wering behind shutters or staring dumbly from the side walks. Out of stiffness broken only by the tramp of boots and hoofs, the crunching of wheels, would sound a shot. Along the line would run the shivering exclamation, ''franc-tireursl" Nerves would snap; there would follow a rush to the point where some imaginative soldier believed that he had identified the sniper. Then would ensue little massacre.
 This combination of militaristic or ders and overstrung nerves accounts doubtless for the larger massacres, such as those of Dinant, Aerschot and Louvain. Of the Aerschot affair, I know little first-hand. The Ger man general staff, who took the lead in abrogating that code of civilized warfare now as dead as feudalism, raked up from savage precedent the custom of taking hostages, answer able for the good behavior of cap tured town. Always they arrested the mayor, usually the priest and any other resident of exceptional promi- hence. Here again entered the per sonal equation. When the officer in charge happened to be brave. req he often overlooked. to the benefit of the hostages. small incident. When he happened to be of the "squiffy" class, or to be panicky over snipers-the hostages died at once. At Aerschot the Germans shot kind of disturbance, either small or grave. Before it was over, scores of the citizens had died against walls. Dinant the BIackest Spot.
 Dinant, on which l have fairly complete information, is the black est spot on the German record in Belgium. The town stands on the heights sof the River Mouse; along the cliffs below it run a series of shallow caves. A detachment of the French army. defeated in the first attack. fell back through its tangled streets. On their retreat they drop ped out snipers, instructed to delay the Germans as much as possible a Suicide detail" Certain of these snipers. abandoning their uniforms, put on civilian clothes and fired by night from the housetops. The Ger mans had found the abandoned French uniforms in cellars and cor ners and understood perfectly the genesis of the trouble. Neverthe- less, the commander issued an order almost incredible for its tactlessness and provocation. He commanded the citizens of Dinant themselves to hunt down and turn over these sni- pers. This was asking the Belgians deliberately to betray their allies and defenders of the firing-squad. Of course they did nothing of the
 
 mander took great number of hos tages, including one woman. That night the sniping continued. In the morning the hostages were shot in full sight of the populace. Probably no one In Dinant but had a relative, friend of a confessor among them. Dinant went wild With sbCNels, cobblestGnes, clubs. bare hands, the men attacked the Germans. The in- vaders opened on the mob with ma chine guns. When he saw what was going to happen, some German officer gathered up as many of the women as he could and herded them into the caves downstream from the town. As to what followed there, let us give the Germans the benefit of the doubt. But the fact remains that either by accident or design several bursts of machine-gun fire raked the caves, killing some of their inmates Next day the town authorities issued more than 360 burial permits. And that is not the total score of the dead.
 Louvain Origin stiIl Unknown.
 The origin of the Louvain outrage will always remain obscure. When, four days before the outbreak of trouble. l was permitted to go for ward from that city to Brussels, all seemed serene. The main German most thorough search for arms, had shot every day four or five Belgians charged with carrying forbidden pis- tols or daggers. Now the army had gone on to the French border. and the permanent garrison was taking over control. After the affair, the Germans told me that the men of