CAPTURED MISSIONARIES IN CHAINS.

Taihape Daily Times, 13 December 1917, Page 7

CAPTURED MISSIONARIES IN CHAINS.

NATIVES FLOGGED AND SHOT

WHEN EXHAUSTED

For the slightest breach of discipline the native soldiers in German East Africa were given 25 lashes with a thick, long whip usually made of hippotamus hide. German native servants not unusually received two punishment of 23 lashes each within 14 days. The boys were laid out in the central yard of the prison camp, each limb being held down, a fifth holding down the head, while a sergeant applied the lashes with full force. Blood was in-

variably drawn by the severity of the punishment.

These scenes of barbarism and deliberate cruelty to the natives of German East Africa, after the outbreak of the war, are described in a series of signed reports on the conduct of the German authorities issued recently in the form of a White Paper. The Rev. Ernest F. Spanton, Principal of St Andrew's College, Zanzibar, tells how the natives were "pressed" into service. Parties of soldiers went into the villages at night, and seized all the young men asleep in their I beds. They were fastened together ! in the fashion of the old Arab slave traders and driven to the nearest fort. I Men engaged in transport work were treated with the greatest brutality. When a man fell exhausted under the weight of his load he was flogged until he staggered to his feet and stumbled on again Those who were too weak to do this were shot as they lay. For example, one of the German officers with the column retreating from the Ruanda country before the

advancing Belgians wrote in a private letter: "Our road is paved with the

corpses of the natives we have beei obliged to kill." Civilian prisoners suffered th< same inhuman treatment. Teacher of the Universities Mission to Centra Africa were arrested. Those from the north were compelled to march hundreds of miles, many of them in chains and carrying burdens, though weak and ill. Most of them were German subjects, but they were regarded as prisoners because they were adherents to the English mission. About 20 of them succumbed to the terrible treatment they received. A British war prisoner, Major Howard D. 5.0., escaped in February, 1915 but was brought back. He was recaptured with a broken rib, a pierced kidney, and a black eye. For five months he was confined in a vermininfested cell 6ft by 3ft. The death rate among Indian soldiers was abnormal, says Mr James Scott Brown. "Out of 400 captured in the neighbourhood of Jesini and brought into the heart of the colony there were fewer than 100 alive when the Belgian Army entered Jahoro."