We had to proceed, and soon reached the town of Bertrix. Some few
houses to the left and right of the road were burning fiercely; we soon
got to know that they had been set alight because soldiers marching
past were said to have been shot at from those houses. Before one of
these houses a man and his wife and their son, a boy of 15 or 16, lay
half burnt to cinders; all had been covered with straw. Three more
civilians lay dead in the same street.
We had marched past some more houses when all at once shots rang out;
they had been shooting from some house, and four of our soldiers had
been wounded. For a short while there was confusion. The house from
which the shots must have come was soon surrounded, and hand grenades
were thrown through all the windows into the interior. In an instant
all the rooms were in flames. The exploding hand grenades caused such
an enormous air pressure that all the doors were blown from their
hinges and the inner walls torn to shreds. Almost at the same time,
five men in civilian clothes rushed into the street and asked for
quarter with uplifted hands. They were seized immediately and taken
to the officers, who formed themselves into a tribunal within a few
minutes. Ten minutes later sentence had already been executed; five
strong men lay on the ground, blindfolded and their bodies riddled by
bullets.
Six of us had in each of the five cases to execute the sentence, and
unfortunately I, too, belonged to those thirty men. The condemned man
whom my party of six had to shoot was a tall, lean man, about forty
years of age. He did not wince for a moment when they blindfolded him.
In a garden of a house nearby he was placed with his back against the
house, and after our captain had told us that it was our duty to aim
well so as to end the tragedy quickly, we took up our position six
paces from the condemned one. The sergeant commanding us had told us
before to shoot the condemned man through the chest. We then formed
two lines, one behind the other. The command was given to load and
secure, and we pushed five cartridges into the rifle. Then the command
rang out, "Get ready!" The first line knelt, the second stood up. We
held our rifles in such a position that the barrel pointed in front of
us whilst the butt-end rested somewhere near the hip. At the command,
"Aim!" we slowly brought our rifles into shooting position, grasped
them firmly, pressed the plate of the butt-end against the shoulder
and, with our cheek on the butt-end, we clung convulsively to the neck
of the rifle. Our right forefinger was on the trigger, the sergeant
gave us about half a minute for aiming before commanding, "Fire!"
Even to-day I cannot say whether our victim fell dead on the spot or
how many of the six bullets hit him....