HIS OWN PEOPLE.

Taihape Daily Times, 19 June 1918, Page 6

HIS OWN PEOPLE.

AN AMERICAN'S STORY OF ' HORROR. THE BESTIAL BOCHE. •"" (By Rifleman Patrick McGill.) It was B who told me the story as we were travelling to Paris. We iad just left a district where the American soldiers were hard at work learning the rudiments of trench warfare preparatory to entering the battle line. B was a newspaper cor. respondent. He had been with the French Army since the beginning of the war. but now he was concentrating his attention upon the American ,forces. "It was last spring/" he said, "when ! I saw once more the village where my fathei was born. That was at the time when the Germans withdrew and the English soldiers pursued them eastwards. 1 got permission to follow in the wake of the British forces, and I came to my village just as the Germans were chased out of it. FIENDISH INGENUITY.

' "It was then that I saw war as I lad-never seen it before. The world's record for fiendish ingenuity was established by those retreating Germans. Snares were left behind by the fleeting foe to entrap the unwary. In abandoned dug-outs, emTTty Souses, deserted trenches, ruined churches, and desecrated shrines, slaughter traps :were cunningly concealed". A dugout floor would, if opened, produce ah explosion, a shovel, apparently thrown down in haste by a German, working man, would detonate a charge if touched, stoves were charged to blow up if a fire was lit in them, chairs if sat upon would explode a hidden mine, cases of explosives were discovered iidden under the cobbled streets, harmless-looking clocks were timed to fclow up small mines, and various objects casually lying about, as if abandoned, were regular traps for killing men.

"Outside, many of the houses were "burned to the ground, and those which were not all plastered over with Slth. To sully the bedclothes in a room seemed to he a particular type <of German humour. The tables and chairs in the little cottages were mere fouling posts for the Kaiser's minions I saw men. soldiers of the British Army, who had been fighting for years in the hellish fields of war, turn physically sick when they saw some of the things I saw in that little village. "I came to ihe little cottoge in which my grandfather dwelt when he was alive. It was burned to the ground. And all the trees which he planted in the orchard were cut down. I went to the churchyard where kin were buried, and there I found a trench dug through my people's grave, the very dead unearthed and their bones scattered all over the open. I looked into the trench, and there I saw two dead Germans. They had apparently been killed that morning < As I was looking at them a British working party came along with picks and shovels. They were going to bury the two .dead men. "Where are you going bury these?' 7 I asked them. " 'We'll just leave them where they are and cover them up,' said the corporal who was with them. AN OFFICER'S DECISION. "That meant that they would bo buried right in my people's grave. They had burned my house, felled my orchard, sullied the beds in the village desecrated the church in which My people said; their pryjsers anil these two Germans were to be buried there. An officer came up at that moment, and I spoke to him, telling him my story. "•'Don't bury those two Germans' ihere,' he said to the digging party when I had finished speaking. 'Carry them out and bury them in the fields.' "I helped to carry them away," said B ."I also helped to bury them. Is it not strange that up to that day I never could muster up any partieuv-.r hatred against the Germans?" be added. "But now I lave a different feeling towards them. Never again, while I live, will I ever l>e able to speak a civil word to a ■German.''