BEATEN GENERAL'S SPITE.

Taihape Daily Times, 22 April 1918, Page 7

BEATEN GENERAL'S SPITE.

BRUTAL PRISON CAMP RULER. New instances of German barbarity ' to war prisoners are described by an officer now at Murren, Switzerland, In a letter to bis mother in England. He was taken prisoner in 1914 and spent nearly three and a-half years in varlious German camps. “At Holzminden,” he writes, “we had to stand in a line with dishes' or plates in our hands at meal times, and as we passed up one German would fling some potatoes on to your dish while another would thrust his filthy hand into a great cauldron and deposit a piece of sinking iTSii on the plate. The commandant—the worst type of Prussian —stood by, saying, "Ach, you will get a meal here as goot as you get in Piccadilly—Ach!’ “No British prisoner in the Tenth German Army Command is sure of his life or reason, mainly because the general commanding was beaten by the English. When I was taken prisoner in 1914, I was forced to carry a wounded German on a shoulder stretcher. When we tried to rest from the pain caused by the bar biting into one’s shoulder we were struck with rifle butts and driven on. One German officer took me behind a house with an armed guard and at the point or the bayonet made me hand over to him my breeches. He gave me in .their place his filthy pair_ The Red Cross sisters at the stations, who gave the Germans food, refused to give us anything. “Never so long as I live will I have anything to do with a German. No savage tribe could behave as the Germans have. Savages have their notions of chivalry, the’ Germans have none; they are simply beasts. “Just think of the change of emerging from this hell and reaching Switzerland! Ten minutes after we crossed the frontier we passed a large crowd of Swiss, standing out in the snow and darkness cheering your train. It was as though we had ceased by magic to be hounded as animals, and become a human being again.”