PILLAGING BRUSSELS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 6, 8 January 1916, Page 3

PILLAGING BRUSSELS.

HOW BELGIANS ARE MADE TO

SUFFER

Throe Belgian refugees, recently esraped from Brussels, have been intrviwed by a correspondent of the London Times, who reporl.- 'hem as saying: ‘‘Numbers of Go-man families now inhabit Brusels. T y’arrive and take any house or apartment that lias been left by its owners, and force the i doors open or drive out the caretakers. > Then—if any good pictures or furniture are in the house —you soon see carts at the' door, and the things are packed off to Germany. The robbery |is open and shameless! Oh, they know what is valuable! Do you believe the treasures of Louvain library ' are burnt? We do not! Yan-loads of stuff left the place before the fire, j The country suffers under a huge tax —4,ooo,ooof. —which has to be paid j monthly. But in addition constant fines are exacted. The Germans cut, for example, a telegraph wire in the j town, say it has been done by a Belgian, and impose a heavy fine on the : whole district. A few days hater they ! cut one in another quarter and fine | that. And the fines have to be paid, j A man refused to work for the Ger- : mans and gave as a reason that he ‘ was an employee of the Beligan Gov- | -eminent. For this refusal the whole l of Brussels was fined. But the Brusj sels population has from the beginj ning firmly refused to obey orders I and salute every passing officer, and

' even dared to openly applaud a Brii tish aeroplane. ‘They were furious I and would have liked to kill us, but they couldn’t kill the whole popula- | tion, which was all rejoicing.-’ News | was very hard to get. They received : fantastic tales of German victory.

Foreign papers were sometimes smuggled in and fetched from of to 20f.,”