HUSBANDS AND FATHERS
Reading edition
Thousands of Belgian citizens have in like manner been deported to the prisons of Germany to Munsterlagen, to Celle, to Magdeburg. At Munsterlagen alone, 3,100 civil prisoners were numbered. History will tell of the physical and moral torments of their long martyrdom.
Hundreds of innocent men were shot. I possess no complete necrology; but I know there were ninety-one shot at Aerschot and that there, under pain of death, their fellow-citizens were compelled to dig their graves. In the Louvain group of communes 176 persons, men and women, old men and sucklings, rich and poor, in health and sickness, were shot or burned.
Cardinal Mercier, Archbishop of Malines, Belgium.
