A PORTRAIT OF OUR ENEMY

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 22 June 1916, Page 3

A PORTRAIT OF OUR ENEMY

THE horrors of the Wittenberg camp, revealed in the Foreign Office Report recently, are scarcely bearable even in print. The knowledge that hundreds of oui countrymen have borne them in reality will deepen the resolve that this war shall not end until the vileness of our enemy has been punished in a fashion that centuries will remember. The baseness of practising cruelty upon helpless prisoners of war has already stamped the German race with a degeneracy incredible before the events of the past two years had put them to the proof, But the manner in which they have deliberately added to the miseries of men afflicted with a terrible disease surpasses even the foul record of animalism that has become attached to them in so many spheres. The conditions at Wittenberg were already barbarous before the epidemic made its appearance. The overcrowding was horrible, and the neglect of sanitary conditions suggests that the German authorities were not unwilling to bring about an epidemic. Prisoners had their own clothing taken from them, and the food supplied to them was quite insufficient to maintain vitality. Germany boasts of being pre-eminent in scientific knowledge, and it needs very slight erudition of that kind to recognise the conditious which make disease inevitable. This is at least ai" prima facie " case for the view that the decimation of the prison camps by this agency was a course at which the exponents of " Kultur " were not unwilling to connive.

The depths to which Germanyhas sunk could not be better illustrated than by the debasement of the medical profession. Dr. Aschenbach, who was in charge of the camp,.abandoned it, along with his assistants, as soon as the epidemic made its appearance. His subsequent investment with the Iron Cross will corroborate the estimate already placed by the world at large upon that decoration. Standing outside the barbed-wire boundary of the domain of death, Dr. Aschenbach refused the medical supplies asked for by the doctors of the prisoners' own nationality, and, with the delight in insult which permeates his race, audibly expressed his indifference to " English swine." The only German doctor who visited the enclosure was one who came to secure bacteriological specimens, and rendered no service whatever to the cause of the crowded sufferers. Such was the behaviour of men representing the educated classes of Germany and trained in a profession whose standard in civilised countries represents the highest pinnacle of unselfishness and chivalry. There could be no stronger evidence of the utter and universal corruption of heart which has infected the German race, or of the paramount duty of uprooting their power to pervert the destiny of mankind.

While Dr. Aschenbach and his colleagues played the cur, the English doctors who were left to grapple with the horrible conditions, and were denied the simplest requisites of their task, acquitted themselves with a heroismbeyond praise. Some of them fell victims to their own devotion, but others .happily survived to bring home the full story of infamy and torture. Some of its features are too revolting to bear notice in d&tail. In its entirety it should prove a tonic even for the minute centres of moral sottishness which still babble >of ''reconciliation." It would be the grossest treachery alike to justice and mercy if the exemplary pumshm.ent, ot those who bear such guilt were not kept foremost among the ends that we seek in war.—Pall Mall Gazette.