GERMAN TERROR IN NORTHERN FRANCE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue LXXIV, 1 April 1918, Page 5

GERMAN TERROR IN NORTHERN FRANCE.

BRITISH PRISONERS BEHIND ! THE LINES.

LONDON, Feb. 20. Reuters Agency has received from a trustworthy Belgian citizen, who has just reached London from the German army zone of Valenciennes in Northern France, an account of the terrible conditions existing, in the occupied provinces, which up one is allowed to eater or leave, andi whence news scarcely ever reaches England. . "When I left "St. "Alnand (Northern France) a few weeks ago," he said, "the conditions had become unbearable. The 'Germans have organised slavery in the army zone. All the men from seventeen to fifty have been taken away. Some were sent to Douai to work on a railway line, others to Alsace. The unmarried women under 40 are obliged to work in the fields, and even the little girls from twelve to fourteen are prevented from going to school and sent to collect acorns and nettles. "If you refuse to work, you are first condemned to pay a fine. If you cannot, or will not, do this, you are shut up in a cell or the prison until the fine is paid or your time is up. If y<Ju refuse a second time, then you are sent to Germany . . . and one seldom comes back" from Germany. In spite of this, a great -many men ureter to be deported rather than work for the enemy. I saw a great many Belgians deported in this way, "Besides the civil orisoners the Germans have brought behind their -fines a great number of prisoners of war wjiom they compel to work undeiTterrible circumstances. There were eighty English and sixty French at Mortagne, and 200 English at Saint-Amand. The English were specially badly treated, and they were all in want of food. "The regime is terrible. A neighbor of mine spent fourteen months in a German prison camr> for hiding an Alsatian absentee whose father was" a Frenchman. Tfie non-commissioned officer, called FlescJimann, who discovered this man, killed him on the spot without trial. The same Fleschmann boxed the ears of another woman with such violence that she became deaf. When she said she would complain to the Kommandantur the sergeant threatened her with, his bayonet. Quite recently I saw in the market place at St. Ainand an old woman, who had been arrested, struclcby a German soldier with the butt of his rifle because she was not able to walk quickly enough.

"Anyone attempting to cross the Francorßelgian frontier is shot at sfght. At a place called Mauldo two Belgians one the father of six children/the olher the father of four children, were killed in this way. The first one was not dead, so they finished him with the butts of their rifles. Not far from there a girl of 13, an orphan, who waslooking after two small children, was killed without warning as she was trying to cross the frontier in order to fetch some bread from a village near by." .