BURIED WITH THEIR BABIES.

Taihape Daily Times, 20 March 1918, Page 3

BURIED WITH THEIR BABIES.

SERBIAN WOMEN SHOT. Sir Charles Wade, Agent-General for New South Wales, in writing to the Premier th&t, on behalf of New South Wales, he had allotted £470 to the Serbian Relief Fund and £IOO to the Montenegrin Red Cross and Relief Fund, enclosed the copy of a speech by a Serbo-Croat Deputy in the Austrian Parliament, exposing “the horrors perpetrated on SerboCrcats, Austrian subjects, with the sanction of the Austrian Government." The speech referred to the systematic extermination of Serbo-Croats “by halter, bullet, and bayonet, dungeon, deportation, imprisonment, and evacuation; by court-amrtial, famine, concentration camps, and by intentionally induced disease.” Serbs were compelled to dig their own graves and lie down in them. Many women lay in their graves with their children in their arms. The soldiers shot them one by one. The survivors had to shovel earth upon the dead until it came to their turn to be shot, and then the graves were filled in by soldiers. In one village a priest was hanged as a hostage, and in another the soldiers drove the inhabitants at the point of the bayonet into the courtyard of the school, and shot them down like rabbits in a battue. Othepeople were drowned, and another lot were tied to haystacks, whichT were set on fire. Many of these innocent victims remained unburied for weeks and their eyes were picked out by ravens.

Evacuated Istrians died in thous ands like flies of hunger, cold, spot ted typhus, and other diseases.