The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 14, 1918. THE WAY OF THE HUNS.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 August 1918, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 14, 1918. THE WAY OF THE HUNS.

A striking illustration is given in this morning's cable of the capacity for brigandage and destruction which the Huns have demonstrated during the Avar. It is stated that before evacuating Montdidier the Germans left little more than a mass of wreckage. The law courts were devastated, ancient tapestries stolen, and the Basilica of St. Peter (a fourth century edifice) sacked. There appears to be no limit to the power and inclination of the Huns in acting the part of insatiable robbers, despoilers and rapacious tyrants, and their fiendish lusts appear to be more than ever accentuated by the spirit of ferocious revenge when they are suffering from military reverses. A defeat turns them into fenraged beasts of prey, with a mad desire for destruction. What they cannot hold must not exist, except as a mass of wreckage or a living testimony to their ruthLess barbarity. To attempt to catalogue the terrible list of German crimes would be a taslc that must be reserved for tlie inevitable day of reckoning, and it will be such a formidable list that it is a wonder these German brigands do not realise tliat they will be called to account for crimes, and will have ■to foot the bill. That they still jproceed in their evil ways proves most conclusively that there can be no peace negotiations witli such ■ hardened criminals, and that nothing but force will make them inend tlieir ways. They started their brutal treatment of Belgium out of revenge for this gallant country daring to thwart the Kaiser's will, and from that time to' the present they have made the Belgians feel tlie weiglit of tlie mailed fist, and the grinding force of the oppressor's heel. We are ' a Pt to Jose sight of Belgium's! "heroic action, without which there ■ is little doubt that even our own independence might have been imperilled. German savagery and' •German ingenuity have not yet their methdds of attack, but murder, imprisonment, .siasery, spoliation, 'want, disease degfexaeat ,jjas»g %%

shake the spirit of the people. It is the same terrible story wherever the .Tluus liiive occupied territory, while even ilie prisoners of war have been subjected to the most horrible tortures, and barbarities it is impossible to conceive. According to a statement made in the House of Commons, the Belgians have ibcen compelled to meet Avar exactions made by Germany to the extent of ninety-three millions sterling up to November last. This is in hard cash, but art treasures and historic edifices—to say nothing of the indiscriminate looting, destruction of towns and villages, devastation of the .country and enslavement of the people —have all to be taken into account, and. all to be paid for in the final reckoning. How can the world, as we know and remember it, continue side by side with an unbeaten, _ unrepentant, unpunished Kaiserism—the embodiment of that trail of horrors which has marked the German war campaign? For a time the slaughter and devastation, the physical agony and heartbreak, the moral repulsion and spiritual testing must continue. One of the most dependable weapons in the armory of the Huns is popular forgetfulness of their infamous record, but the continual reminder, such as the sacking of Montdidier, will keep these records alive. Better perpetual war than a regime of hate and lying. The only way in which the work of Belgium and the other oppressed nations can be fittingly recognised is by the complete overthrow of Prussianism, and rendering a recurrence of Ilun devilry impossible in the future.