In the track of the Treaty Breakers

Category

Library Item

Item no

32956

Title

In the track of the Treaty Breakers

Description

"Statement attested by M. Joseph Rymen of Schaffen-les-Diest:

Shortly afterwards these Uhlans had an encounter with the carabiniers ... Four or five of these Uhlans were killed ... and the others fled, and we thought that, just as before, we were free from them. Alas! half an hour later thousands of Germans came ... These Uhlans took me prisoner before all my people. They then immediately shot dead Alfons Wouters, thirty-nine years of age, who was running away with his eighty-year-old mother. I was forced to follow them and heard that other people were shot while the remainder tried to take to flight. They dragged me across the village and set ablaze all the houses they hound on the road. The cattle and hogs were chased into the streets and were afterwards caught and taken to their stores. As they led me past the fires I had to witness horrible sights. They started their work of destruction about an hour's distance from Diest along the Diest-Beeringen highway. They set the 'Zwarten Ring' inn ablaze after having eaten and drunk there, and as a reward they shot the proprietor dead ... On reaching the village they shot the two brothers Verheyen, thirty and thirty-two years of age, who were still on their farms. Besides this they pierced them with their lances, threw them in to a neighbouring ditch, and then covered them with a little grass. They then set fire to the whole village and to the thickly populated hamlet of Schoonaerde, with the exception of two stables and the nuns' school, the former for their horses. - pp. 64-65. 'The Case of Belgium.' New York, 1914."

Artist / maker

Raemaekers, Louis

Date

1916

Size

34.4 x 27.7 cm

Type

Chromolithograph

Location

Art and Design Library

Copyright

Louis Raemaekaers' drawings are reproduced by kind permission of the Louis Raemaekers Foundation.