AN INHUMAN SCENE.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 168, 15 July 1916, Page 15

AN INHUMAN SCENE.

GERMANS JEEK MAIMED lIUSHMA.V

An exchanged prisoner who has returned to England, relating his experiences as a prisoner of war being taken to Wurzburg, writes of a young Irishman who was in the carriage with him, Kays the

"Times." This young man hail been very badly wounded in the face, having lost the sight of one eye, was also deaf in one ear, and shockingly disfigured. At Aschaffenburg. one of the places they stopped at on the journey, a mob came in to look at the prisoners.

"The scutry was telling our visitors that ono of the Englamlers had been ahot in the face and was badly disfigured. Whereupon a German soldier pulled the poor fellow out of the sleeping mass on the floor, and sat him upon the seat, the others standing round pointing with their fingers ■at the poor mutilated face with coarse, jeering laughter.

"The young Irish soldier sat patlent'y through it all—his blind eye was a running sore, the lorn cheek in healing iiad left a hideously K-.irrcd hollow, amj the moutu and nope were twisted to one side. His condition would have stirred pity in the heart of a savage, and yet these Germans laughed anil jeered.

"So much stronger is the impression of tilings seen than things heard, that, although I have second-hand evidence of far worse horrors of wounded men shot, of men of a. well-known regiment kicked an<l beaten along the road to a German prison —none of these things, no atrocity of Leuvain, no Btory of women and children tortured, has moved mt> so much to a deep loathing of Germany as the pathetic sight of this young Irishman and his heartless tormentors."

An English, oflicer who saw the outrage did not know what became of this poor fellow—probably one of the Irishmen tor'tnred to death at Lejnburs.