MALTREATED BRITISH OFFICERS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 57, 23 February 1918, Page 15

MALTREATED BRITISH OFFICERS.

BRUTAL CRUELTY OF GERMANS.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ln a letter to the "Times," writes: —

I had occasion recently to talk 'with a British officer who had endured captivity ln Germany. With a voice which was husky with passion, trembling with the violence of his own feelings, he told mc what he and his comrades had gone through.

This officer, of senior regimental rank, a man of dignity and refinement, was taken wounded at the end of 1914. With his comrades ln captivity he was starved during the long two days' journey from the front to his prison. At one point, he thinks that It was Cologne, a soup canteen upon wheels was rolled up to their compartment ln order to mock them. Still starving and suffertng tortures from their •wounds, they reached the town of their captivity. 'Weak, shaken, and unnerved, they assembled outside the station, hardly able to stand after their dreadful Journey. What ensued can only be described in his own forcible words.

"They kicked our behlnds all the way up the street. There was not one of us who had not his behind kicked." These were British officers, honourable gentlemen, many of them wounded, now helpless under circumstances which have ln all ages appealed to the chivalry of the captors. And we, when a German filer Is caught red-handed with his apparatus ready for the murder of the civilians of London, hurry him away that he may "nave a hot supper.

This officer was, as I was told by a third party, a witness of the dreadful Incident of the burning hut. One of the huts In the prison camp took fire. It was night, and the door had been locked on the outside. The key could not be found. One of the inmates, a sailor, tried to get through the narrow window. The sentry of the hut rushed forward. The prisoners who were spectators thought that he was about to draw the man through. What he actually did was to pass bis bayonet through the sailor's throat. I am told that the horrified onlookers dropped on their knees, men ot all the Allied countries, and swore to God that so long as they lived they would never show mercy to any man of German blood. Can we blame .them? Would we not have felt the same?

Sir A. Cotian Doyle urges that the fullest publicity should be given to tlic facts.