DYING LIKE FLIES.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 December 1915, Page 9 (Supplement)

DYING LIKE FLIES.

POLES UNDER PRUSSIAN HEELS. "After what I have seen and heard in Switzerland," said Miss Alma Tadeina, the secretary of the Polish Relief Fund, to a Weekly Dispatch representative. "I feel as if I would like to get on the top of St. Paul's Cathedral and cry, 'Help! Help! Help!' so that the whole of England could bear—for sin.e the fall of Warsaw it is tile abomination of desolation in my beloved Poland, and the population are dying like (lies. "In most of Galicia there is hardly a child under six years of age left alive, and jh the Austrian concentration camps scarcely a single child under eight has survived. In some of the camps civilians are being buried at the rate of twentyfive to thirty in one day, so bad are the conditions. "SUMMARILY SHOT." "The stories one hears from all sides aro heartrending. A poor peasant woman living in German Poland had suffered much at the hands of the Prussians, and had had her soli called up at the declaration of war to fight upon the side of the oppressor of their country. Needless to say he was forced to go against his will, but it was not, the actual idea of fighting which appalled him so much as the thought of slaying his own brother Poles in battle. "One day she received a letter from the front written by her son, in which he spoke of the horrors of the campaign and the sufferings he had to endure fighting against his country. The letter finished, off with the words: 'But don't j be afraid, dearest mother, that I have j shot any of my brothers, for each time I ; fire I close my eyes and aim up in the i air.' "Wondering how such a phrase could have escaped the censor, she asked someone who understood Gorman what the red writing which ran across the page meant, and the unfortunate translator had to translate the words of the official 'Summarily shot' to the distracted mother.

"Tlie poor woman, however, l»orr» the news with wonderful bravery. "Thank God," she said, kissing the death sentence, 'my son died for Poland.'

"It is an appalling example of Prussian official brutality; but it is only one of a thousand examples I could tell of. All Switzerland echoes with them."