SORROWS OF SERVIA

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 143, 17 June 1916, Page 14

SORROWS OF SERVIA

AUSTRIAN'S RIVAL THE HUNS,

A terrible picture of the sufferings of Servia has been drawn by Colonel Govaars, of the Salvation Army. For five months Colonel Govaars—a Dutchman—was engaged in carrying out relief work for the Army in the northwestern districts of Servia.

In Shabatz, the first town which the Austrian Army occupied, he gaid he had placed in his hands a document containing an order, of the commander of the Austrian troops to n subordinate officer. It read : —" Open all 'the bottles in the chemist's shop, pour into each a solution of nitrate of silver, close them and put them back in their places." The purpose was to poison the people. The order was duly executed, but the officer who gave it evidently did not know much about chemistry, because the effect- of the chemical combination of the different substances was in mo6t cases cleojly visible, and the fiendish scheme frustrated itself.

Fifteen hundred men, women, and children were locked in a church for three days and nights without food or drink. Babies were born and mothers died 'there, and unspeakable sufferings were endured. After three days1 the Austrian soldiers took about 150 of the people out, lined them up against the church wall, and shot them dead, their bodies being flung into a pit close by. Austrian soldiers turned even the drawing-rooms of the best houses in Vhe town into stables for their horses. All the furniture was stolen and the town and the surrounding villages were plundered wholesale. Some of the houses were deliberately set on fire, and cares ■were on record of. entire families being burned to death.

At Dobrich 46 defenceless men, women, and children, who had taken refuge in a house were bayoneted by four Austrian soldiers and flung into a cellar. i At another village, Lesnitm, the Austrians made the old men dig a pit, and on the edge of it 150 were shot.