A FIENDISH ACT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1865, 17 August 1918, Page 1

A FIENDISH ACT.

YET ANOTHER PICTURE OF THE HATED HUN. DOCTOR’S CRUELTY. (In “Gunner Dopew,” Albert N. Dopew, an American who was in Belgium at the outbreak of the. war, tolls some* of his experiences both as a neutral and a belligerent. Here is a ghastly story of Hun- brutality.) My wound was just a clean, gunshot wound, and not very serious, so, although it was not completely healed, they let me go after three weeks. But before I went 1 saw something that no man of ns will ever forget. Some of them look vows just: like the men of the Legion I told you about. One of the patients was a German doctor, who had been picked up in No Man’s Land, very seriously wounded. He was given the same treatment as any of us, that is, the very best, but finally the doctors gave him, up. They thought he would die slowly, and that it might lake several weeks. But there was a nurse there who took special interest in his case, and she stayed up day and .night for some time, and finally brought him through. The ease was very well known, and everybody said she had performed a miracle. Ho got heller slowly. Then a few weeks later, when he was out of danger and was able to walk, and it was only a uueslion of time before he would he released from the hospital, tins nurse was transferred to another hospital. Everybody knew her and liked her, and when she went round to say good-live all the men were sorry, and gave her little presents, and wanted her to write to (hem. She was going to get a nurse she knew in the other hospital to turn her letters into English, so that she could write to me. I gave her a ring I had made from a pieee of shell-case, but 1 guess she Juul hundreds of them like that. But the German doctor would not say good-bye to her. Thai would not have made me sore, but it made this French girl feel very had, and she began to cry. One of the Gorman .offieers saw her, and found out about the doctor, and the officer went up and spoke to the German. Then the French officer left, and the German called to the nurse, and she went over to him and stopped ('vying. They talked for a little while, and (hen she put out her hands as if she was going to leave. He pul out his hands, too, and took hold of hers. And then he twisted her wrists and broke them. We heard the snap. There were men in that ward who had not been on foot since the day they came to the hospital, and one of them was supposed to he dying, but it was an absolute fact that when we heard her scream then* was not a man left in bed. I need not tell you what we did to the German. They did not need to shoot him after we got through with him. They did shoot what was left of him, to make sure, thong!;. Now, 1 have heard people say that it is not the Germans we are fighting, hut (he Kaiser and his system. Weil, it may he true that some of the Boche soldiers would not do these things if they did not have to; myself, I um not so sure. But yon lake this doctor. Hen* he was, an (>(lncatod man, who had been trained all his life to help people who wen* in pain, and not to cause it. And he was not wherg he would have to obey the Kaiser or any other German. And this nurse had saved his life. Bo I do not see that there is any argument a bout it. He broke that girl’s wrists because he wanted to; that is all there is to it. Now, I say this German doctor was a dirty cur and a scoundrel. But 1 suy that he is a fair sample of most of the Gormans I have met. And it is Germans of this kind we arc fighting—not merely the Kaiser. It is like going to college. 1 have never been there, hut 1 have heard some people'.say it did not do a man any gbod to go. But I have never heard a man who went there say that. Probably yon have not been over there, and maybe you think we are not fighting the German people, hut only the Kaiser and his flunkeys. Well, nobody had better tell me that. Because I have been there, and I have seen this. And I know.