HORRORS OF INVASION.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 292, 13 July 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

HORRORS OF INVASION.

FRENCH WOMEN SPEAK. By E. ALMAZ STOUT. Miss E. Almaz Stout i» the first British woman to visit those parts of France reconquered from the Germans, nad we Rive below her first impressions.—"Daily Mail."

Some few miles from the line which the Huns held for so many months !u the big salient in the region of Royc, Lassigny, and Noyon, lies a village where, in one sector, isl to be found horror—stark naked horror.

Close to the village station is a little township of long wooden huts, destined for a vast military hospital ia the days before the Great Retreat carried the battle-line many miles farther north. And now these nuts are put to a different but no less heartrending use.

For there, collected in their hundreds and thousands, are old men, women, and children from all the coun-try-side which the Huns have so systematically and so devilishly devastated, and the stream is hourly swelling. Three years ago they were haippy, thrifty, (hard-working members of a prosperous little community. To-day they are homeless, penniless, emaciated wrecks clutching their small bundles, the sole relics of their once happy homes, in their attenuated arms. As I passed from hut to Jiut, each crowded to overflowing with its human wreckage, my step grew heavier, and the cheering and sympathetic word so oi or.frly 'looked (for came with 'more difficulty. y First I visited a Couple of huts containing, roughly, some hundred old men and women, mostly quite out of their minds*. Many of them, sick and diseased, hnd lived for 30' months in a cellar, some with such appalling open iwounds that the condition in which they arrived beggars description. lam not "oft" to use pretty words, but if I spoke the naked truth it could not bo printed. It was almost impossible to get anything coherent from these. They just wept when spoken to, or kissed hand, or merely bowed their heads in a hopeless misery which could not yet appreciate the fact that the days of their greatest hardships were over. THE YOUNG, STRONG MOTHERS. / Another hut was filled wth women and chldren, most of them ill, some dying from privation. For 30 months they had not touched meat or eaten sufficient of any sort of food to keep bodv and soul together. One mother, tending in turn her three chilrden, mites whoso skeleton bodies and .white faces with prematurely old and fear-filled eyes haunt me stir, told me between her sobs that they were all she ha,d left in the world, and two of them were obviously dying. Her husband was a prisoner, her home burned, and all her little treasures taken from her. She had the clothes in which he stood up and nothing more. She came from a village which the Germans had left somewhat hurriedly too hurriedly to destroy before their departure —and so when thev had gone a little way they stopped aJid bombarded it till scarcely a cottage iwas left, although they knew better than anyone else there were onl/ women and children and old men left in it. She pointed out to me two ragged little girls in one corner and three small boys playing on the floor in another, and said, "These children are worse off than mine. Their mothers were young and strong, and they have both been taken away by the German officers to work in Germany. How they wept when they were draped away from their little ones by. the Bodies'! My eves were dim with tears as I turned to an old woman in a few wretched rags audi said, "You will never want to see a German again?" I was almost frightened at the result of my words, former face became frenzied as she cried. "I live now ior only one tiling, for I have lost everytiling—my husband, my sons, my homo, my only daughter, who was ruined by a German devil. I am going to pray. 31. Poincare that one diav he will give a German into my hands that I may tear out hi! eyas w'th my own fingers! Let any woman who reads what I have written, suffer as thalt woman suffered, and I think no one will dare to sit in judgment on her. . Suddenly I heard a voice cry out in mv own tongue. "Ah. mr.dame, s'uroly you are English ? Come and styeak to lue." , I turned to see an old woman witli the tears rolling down her cheeks as she held out her .arms to me, and i went to her bedside. I asked after her husband, but sue shook her head. " I do not know. He was in Paris when Avar broke out, and for nearly 3 years 1 have heard nothing. Without doubt lie is derd." She told me how she was ill in hospital in the village which she hau made her home when the Germans entered, how thev stole every metal utensil from the hospital, even the knobs of the doors, and went the nurses and house doctor to care for their own wounded, leaving the French sick and aged utterly untended. Hl'X TOTAL OF PRISONERS. During the long, terrible years-that these people lived in German, bondage not one worpd reached them of the outer world save what the Germans chose to let tli' in have. Their .sole newspaper was the now famous "Gazette des Ardennes," of which she showed me several extracts, one in particular pointing out that the Germans and Frcii-h were re.illy eood friends', Jind only the treacherous IviuriUli prevented them from linking the ,>eace that two brave enemies who respected each other would otherwise make. SI 10 told ill!' new the Germans stole .ill the food from their lio-pital. the live fowls and rabbits and wlvu the sister "l ehi:!i'L r e expostulated, sayn" she mils' I'eed her sick, the ofiicer answered. "1 •i)o must feed mine. Your si'k hive had all thev needed for a, long time, if p.eeds he. tli<*v must