HUN BARBARIANS.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 October 1918, Page 7

HUN BARBARIANS.

A GRUESOME STORY. A gruesome story is told in the following letter, written to his parents from "somewhere in France" by Private A. R. ("Rus.") Garling, a young Sydney soldier, since wounded and discharged, and at present spending a health-recruiting holiday in Wanganui as the guest of Mr Hean:— *i

"Prussians and Bavarians they are called. Barbarians it should be, for barbarians were never guilty of greater atrocities than have been enacted by the Huns. Yesterday our bombing party drove the devils out of an occupied village. The revolting sight that met our gaze when we entered a house that had been used as officers' quarters, can only be effaced from memory by death. Impaled by bayonets to the door of what had once been a comfortable home were the naked bodies of two young women, presumably daughters of the former occupants. Heavens knows what fate had befallen the parents; but certain it is that the. girls had been outraged to gratify the fiendish lust of the German officers, who, when they found they could hold the place no longer, cold-bloodedly crucified their hapless, helpless victims; on the principle, no doubt, that the dead tell no tales. Why these unfortunate women should have been stripped before being murdered is incomprehensible, unless it were that the brutes into whose merciless hands they had fallen found some depraved form of delight in degrading and torturing their prey to the last breath."