GIRLS DRIVEN MAD.

Taihape Daily Times, 4 February 1918, Page 6

GIRLS DRIVEN MAD.

VICTIMS OF THE HUN IN FRENCH HOSPITALS

As a member of the American Fin uncial Mission Mr. Leon Dabo, one of New York’s best-known artists, has just returned to America after several month's passed in investigating many phases of the war situation in France and England. “You ask me what I saw over there that impressed me most sharply? he said. “I will tell you. It was the hospitals—the hospitals filled with the refugees from the devastated districts. “I speak of the devastated districts of France —we did not go to Belgium. Especially there were the girls m the hospitals, French girls, nine jears of age and older who had been the vie thus of Prussian soldiers, dragged through the most unspeakable horrors, and many of them driven insane by the treatment they had received. I remember one girl, fifteen years of age, who was raving mad. Her body was in a terrible condition, and she was soon to become a mother. This was in a hospital at Nancy. There were many girls in little better condition. Perhaps it is not generally known that 21 per cent of the girls who have been subjected to these tortures at the hands of the Huns have been diiven insane by it. “At Gcrbevillicrs, about eleven miles from Nancy, Prussian soldiers took a girl sixteen years of age, carried her to the town square and, after they had attacked her, trussed her up to the limb of a tree, poured gasolene on her, and set her on fire. This was done in the presence of the aged people of the village. None of the men of the town remained, as they had all been taken for war. In the same village the Huns took a blacksmith, nearly eighty years of age, a whitehoari ed man, and, placing his hands on , his own anvil crushed them into pulp. These two persons were brought to the same hospital.

“The young girls of the devastated districts they took to the trenches, but no women escape them. Even aged women were attacked.

“They took pictures, hangings, clothing—everything which it was possible to transport and which justified the expense of transportation to Germany. And what they could not transport they destroyed, with unspeakable filth. Perhaps you have seen that phrase in the newspapers. It covers the most horrible things.’ “How do you account for this ruth-

lossncss?” “I believe the whole nation has gone mad, and the officers are the mad-

dest of all. Everything is done under direction, The Prussian soldier does nothing without orders. He does not even light a cigarette or cat without permission. When it came to ruining the country every fifth man was supplied with a torch for setting fire to buildings.

“It is this sort of madness: These men really believe, according to the Prussian system of education, that there is only one God, and He is German. They believe that all nations but Germany have become so degenerate that God has delegated the German Kaiser to wipe them out and seize their lands for the good Christian German people. Thus believe that tho French and English must be killed off and that all brutalities to this end arc justifiable.

“Therefore without any qualms whatever, they have done their best to ruin France,, They have destroyed that lovely country. They have not left a tree standing, not one stone upon another, nor a piece of furniture nor a picture nor a church nor a bit of farm land that they could get. their hands on. They have mangled and ruined and burned and tortured systematically. They have brutally attacked tiny girls of five and six years, and they have mutilated the boy children of France.”