MURDER MOST FOUL.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 April 1918, Page 7

MURDER MOST FOUL.

THINGS SEEN THAT ALL SHOULD REMEMBER. (By Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis.) Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, one of Ame. rica's foremost ministers, of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn (of which the first pastor wbb Henry Ward Beecher), spent Jnly and August in a personal investigation of th« battlefields of France and Belgium from which the Germans had been expelled. He desired to learn for himself the exact conditions and to find out whether all the reports of German atrocities would be confirmed by a per* sonal study. Since he returned to America, Dr. Hillis has delivered a number of public addresses. The discourse printed in the following pages was delivered from the pulpit at Baltimore to a church packed to the doors. It attracted enormous interest, enabling Americans to grasp the meaning of Prussia's war against civilisation, Christianity and democracy. To many in Great Britain the facts set out by Dr. Hillis are known. But they are not known to all. They should be known to all. Once the truth of this indictment sinks into the heart and mind of every citizen, and the date when the war will end is determined, war can only end when the Prussian f.overnment. responsible for these fearful outrages, is shorn of its power for

The German philosophy has dehumanised Germany's officers and men. Later on I shall give a detailed account of the devastated regions of Northern France but here and now let us confine observations, to the ruined villages and towns of Eastern France. p,,H mg nig iron token out of his pocket-that exhibited Deity as a destroying soldier-the German officer and private reads the words Ihe Day of Judgment will not ask you for your reasons." Having, therefore, «1 -LV° loot ' these Qe ™»™ b e : came w.ld beasts The plan had been ■Brusse s in one week, Pans in two weeks, London in two months » and then and watches from Paris or Nancy for the sweethearts at home J mi * £"*> ° ne - half itß ""now It tnl=° /"»' paaßin K French towns and vllages where there were no Frenchmen, no guns, and where no shots ZZI T\ J"'y and August we the children, comparing the photographs and the ful official records made at the time with the statements of the poor, wretched survivors, who lived in cellars where once there had been beautiful now was only desolation jL Ge T b 7 i l, , . ie r standin * beßide their SEE'J S« ei H lO P* of the bodies of fifteen old men whom the Germans lined up and shot because there were no young soldiers to kill; heard the detaded story of a woman whose son was first hung to a pear tree in the ft".* 2» officer 4nd sold.er hadjeft him and were busy setting fire to the next house, she cut the rope revived the strangled youth, only to find the soldiers had returned, and while the officer held her hands behind her back his assistant poured petrol on the son's head and clothes, set fire to him, and, Si? .5* "*»»» wd abou t. a flaming torch they shneked with laughter. When they had burned all the houses and retreated the next morning, the Prefect ot Lorraine reached that Gethsemane and photographed the bodies of thirty a"ed men lying a? they fell, the bodie*°of women stripped and at last slain In the next village stood the ruined square Udfrv into which the Germans had lifted machine-guns, then forced every woman and child—27s in number —into the little church, and notified the French soldiers that if they flrW upon the machine-guns thev would kill their own women and children. After several days' hunger and thirst, at midnight these brave women slipped a little boy through the church window ami bade their husbands fire upon the Germans in the belfry, saying they preferred death to the indignities they were suffering. And so these Frenchmen turned their guns, and in blowing that machinegun out of the belfrv killed twenty o} their own wives and children. In a hundred years of history where shall you find a record of any other race who call themselves civilised who are such sneaking cowards that they could not fight like raea or play the 'game fairly, but in their chattering terror put women and little children before them as a shield ?