GIRLS DRIVEN MAD.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 February 1918, Page 3

GIRLS DRIVEN MAD.

VICTIMS OF THE HUN IN FRENCH HOSPITALS. As a member of the American Financial Mission, Mr. Leon Dabo, one of New York's best-known artists, has just returned to American after several months passed in investigating many phases of the war situation in France and England. ■ . j "Von ask me what I saw over there tiliat impressed me most sharply?" he sa'd. "I- will tell you. It was the hospitals—the hospitals filled with refugees from the devastated districts. "I speak of the devastated districts of France—we did not go to Belgium. Especially there were the girls in hospitals, French girls, nine years of age and older, who had been the victims of Prussian soldiers, dragged through the most unspeakable horrors, and many of them driven insane by tlhe treatment they had received. 1 remember one girl, fifteen years of age, who was raving mad. .Her body was in a horrib'e condition, and she was soon to (become a mother. I'. was in a hospital at Nancy. There w-r many girls in little better 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 driven insane by it.

"At Gerbevillicrs, 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 tip to the limb of a. tree, poured gapt)line on her, and set her on lire, ./his was done in the presence of tlio aged people of the vilage. None of the men of the town remained, as they had all been taken for the war. In the village the Huns took a blacksmith nearly eighty years of »ge, a white-haired man, and, placing Bis hands on his own anvil, crashed them into pulp. These two persons were brought to the same hospital. "The young girls of the devastated districts they look to the. trenches, but no-women escape them. "Even .aged worn en 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 conhHiot transport they dc-stroyod, with unspeakable filth. Perhaps you have seen that phrase in the [■newspapers. It covers the most horrible I things." j "How do you account for this ruthllessncss?"

"I believe the whole nation has gone mad and the officers are the maddest of all Everything is done under direction. The Prussian soldier does nothing without orders. He does not even light a cigarette or eat without permission. When it came to ruining a 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, there is only one God, and He is Gerjhan. Tl" believe that all' nations but Germany have become so degenerate that God has delegated the Kaiser to wipe them out and seize- their lands for the good Christion German people. Thus they believe that the French and English 'must be killed off, and tllmt all ""brutalities to this end are 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. ior a church, nor a bit of farm land Vhtit they could get. their hands on. They have mangled and ruined and hurnwl arid tortured systematically. They have brutally attacked tiny girls [of fivo and six years, and they have uawtjlated the boy «hfldre» of Frsrnw."