I think that statement is not the full truth, and I do not
think it will be the estimate of history on the resistance of the
Belgians. If the resistance had been regarded by the Germans as
half-hearted, I do not believe their reprisals on villages and towns and
on the civilian population would have been so bitter. The burning and
the murder that I saw them commit throughout the month of September,
1914, was the answer to a resistance unexpectedly firm and telling. At a
skirmish in September, when fifteen hundred Belgians stood off three
thousand Germans for several hours, I counted more dead Germans than
dead Belgians. The German officer in whose hands we were as captives
asked us with great particularity as to how many Belgians he had killed
and wounded. While he was talking with us, his stretcher-bearers were
moving up and down the road for his own casualties. At Alost the street
fighting by Belgian troops behind fish-barrels, with sods of earth for
barricade, was so stubborn that the Germans felt it to be necessary to
mutilate civilian men, women, and children with the bayonet to express
in terms at all adequate their resentment. I am of course speaking of
what I know. Around Termonde, three times in September, the fighting of
Belgians was vigorous enough to induce the Germans on entering the town
to burn more than eleven hundred homes, house by house.
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