THE GENTLE HUN

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16154, 7 March 1918, Page 3

THE GENTLE HUN

viiOiißl HLE STORY OF METHODS

OF COLONISATION"

Some idea of the brutal and cruel colonising me-thods of the Hun is given b,v "Afrieanus" in the London "Morning Post." H is the story of ho-.v the Heroics in German South-West Africa were driven out into the desert to die 1 v General von T rotha. who by a proclamation dated October 20th, ISOI, ordered the iloreros nation to leave the country under penalty of being shot. This document he signed "The Great General of the Mighty Emperor, von

That was the death warrant- of 14,C00 Hereros who, after the battles in ..ho Writer berg, as Pastor Sehowalter states, "disappeared into the sand desert and here their lmnes lie bleaching. live thousand mav ha v.; fallen 111 the battles, and thousands more in theconcentration < amps and railway work." The story is tola by several witnesses, hut most poignantly by a German'(tho famous. ' l'etfr Moor") m the book ••Peter Moor's Fahrt inch feudwest, j which is iho account of a soldier returned from the Herero campaign or what he did and saw. •'The further we went m the burning sun, - ' says l'eter Moor, '/themore disheartening became our journey. How ( deeplv the wild crowd of sorrowrul peo- , pie had humbled themselves m the terror of death. There lay the wounded and old. the women and the children. ''A number of babies lay helplessly languishing by mothers whose breasts hung down long and flabby. Others were lyinn- alone, still living, with eyes and noses full of flies. Somebody sent, out our black drivers, and I think they holped them to die. All this 1"® ' a - v scattered there, both man and beast, broken in the knees, helpless, and motionless. It looked as if it liad all been thrown out out of the air. At noon wo halted *bv water-holes which were filledto the very brim with corpses.

DYING OF THIRST. "The Germans were pitilessly driving them into the desert. At night they could soe the fires of the sindlo bribes which were trying to detach ..tnemselves from the main body and break through, to the west- to escape a • death from thirst, the most cruel of all deaths. They were stopped and driven back. At one point five men and eight or women and children werb found squatting about a dismal little fire. "Wo led the men away to one side and shot tliem. The women and children, who looked pitiably starved, we hunted into the bush."

And Peter Moor, with his terrible simplicity, gives an almost unbearable picture of how the last remnants were , driven from their water-holos in a dry river-bed into the ■wilderness to die. "From a hill we saw two mighty clouds of dust moving rapidly to the north and northeast, towards curtain death from thirst. ... As I "was peering by chance into somo bushes about fiftv yards off I ssrw, among and under them, people sitting in crowds, shoulder against shoulder, quite motionless. The heads of some drooped on their breasts, and their arms hung down, as if they were asleep. Others sat leaning against a bush or a neighbour, breathing fast and hard, their mouths open; they regarded us with stuptdfeyes." STRUNG UP TO TREES.

Such was the result of militarism in South-West Africa. Some of its details were given in the "Cape Argus" at that time from the testimony of a young Dutchman called F. Wepener:— "At Okanjiso, about February 12th, 1905. I saw a number of women andl children executed. There were eight women and six children. They were all strung up to trees by the neck and then shot. All the women and- children we captured while I was on the march were treated in the same way. I have seen at least twenty-five of them with my own eyes hanged and shot."