MURDER OF WOUNDED.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1754, 1 September 1917, Page 4

MURDER OF WOUNDED.

The attack by German aeroplanes on French hospitals is not without precedent in the annals of German crime. In his account of the Russian offensive last year, Mr Stanley Washburn describes a similar “campaign of pure murder'’ against wounded Russians, though it was not marked by the extreme ferocity of the outrage at Verdun. “Every day there are bomb raids here,” he wrote on August 3rd. “The machines fly as low as possible, pouring machine-gun fire into the panicstricken populace, which bears the brunt of all these attacks. The hospitals are being bombed daily, the English hospitals having suffer-' ed already twice from this atrocious practice. Many wounded have been killed by the bombs. A still more atrocious practice has lately been adopted. The airmen sweep down and drop bombs on the high roads behind the lines. Two days ago a German airman on a stretch of road between here and Lutsk, which is open country, discovering an unprotected column of ambulances plodding through the dust, planed down just above it and opened fire with a machine-gun, killing 20 wounded men within. These carts, with their canvas coversj are unmistakable, and this act can only be characterised as wanton and brutal murder.”