"DYING LIKE FLIES."

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 348, 8 December 1915, Page 7

"DYING LIKE FLIES."

POLES UNDER PRUSSIAN HEELS

"After what I have seen and heard in Switzerland," said Miss Alma Tadema, the secretary of the Polish. Relief Fund, to a "Weekly Dispatch" representative, "I feel as if I would like to get on the top of St. Paul's Cathedral and cry, 'Help! Help! Help!' so that the whole of England could hear —for since the fall of Warsaw it is the abomination of desolation in my beloved Poland, and the population are dying like flies. "In most of Galicia there is hardly a child under six years of age left alive, and in the Austrian concentration camp scarcely a single child und>er eight has survived. In some of the camps civilians are being bXiried at the rate of twenty-five to thirty in one day, so bad are the conditions. "SUMMARILY SHOT." "The stories one hears from all sides are heartrending. A poor peasant woman living in German Poland had suffered much at the hands of! the Prussians, and had had her son called up at the declaration of war to fight upon the side of the oppressor cf their country. Needless to say he was forced to go against his will, but it. was net the actual idea of fighting which appalled him so much as the thought of slaying his own brother Poles in battle.

"One day she received a letter from the front written by her son, in which he spoke of the horrors of the campaign and the sufferings he had to endure fighting against his country. The letter finished off with the words: 'But don't be afraid, dearest mother, that I have shot any of my brothers, for each time I fire I close my eyes and aim up in the air.' "Wonderni how such a phrase could have escaped the Censor, she asked someone who understood German what the red writing which ran across the page meant, and the unfortunate translator had to translate the words of the official 'Summarily shot' ofc the distracted mother.

"The poor woman, however, bore th news with wonderful bravery. 'Thank God," she said, kissing the death sentence, "my son died for Poland." "It is an appalling example of Prussian official brutality; but it is only one of a thousand examples I could tell of. All Switzerland fccuoos with them."