ON THE RUN

Hokitika Guardian, 22 October 1918, Page 2

ON THE RUN

ALLIES STILL ADVANCE CLEARING FRENCH SOIL - GERMANY’S PEACE REPLY A GROTESQUE REQUEST SAVE THE PEOPLES “HONOR

THE INHUMAN HUN

MORE ENEMY BRUTALITY. TALES OF SHOCKINC HORRORS, AND ACTS OF FIENDS (United Service) Telegrams). (Received This Day at 8.45 a.m.)

London, October 21 The war correspondents draw terrible pen pictures of the Germans’ brutality in the emancipated cities. Mr Beach Thomas writes The Blood and agony of British prisoners and Franco-Belgian women, cry from the streets of all these towns. More, the British chaplain in Lille who saw the* black bole prison with its shifting population of 800 prisoners, who was present daily at the progressive deaths of starved and bullied men, who read the burial service over 200 Englishmen who died of oppression, has corroborators from Bohain to Ostend. Among the self-sacrificing men and women who suffered blows and imprisonment in their endeavours to save prisoners from starvation, they saw men tumble in the streets from sheer inanition. The Germans indulged in reprisals for invented crimes, and shelled civilians in the villages near Lille, because a French ship bombarded Alexandretta. They gave the British prisoners no food for three days, because, so they said, German prisoners were under shell fire at the Somme. J have sworn testimony from Lille to Turcoing and Roubaix that they snatched, in the middle of the night, thorsands of women away. Dying men were left alone and many could not Lid farewell to their daughters. For six months they had no news of them. The sight they had was the return of their once innocent daughters, aged, dirty and avoi’ii, after months of forced labour in the barracks, mean, filthy and cold. Roubaix and Turcoing alone supplied 1,800 of these women slavts. The German brutality was only exceeded by their meanness. They gutted eA r ery house and factory and paid nothing, except for food and drink, rvhereof they paid one quarter of the price in paper. I went to a Convent of teaching Sisters, to a triend. “Is it really four years,” I asked, “since yon had neAvs.” She answered that for four years and seven days she had had no whisper of the fate of the nearest or dearest, nor had their letters gone.. The Germans sold them special postcards at high prices and then destroyed the mail. That’s the sort of money grabbing and brutality to which the civilians were treated.