GERMAN BRUTALITY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16234, 20 May 1916, Page 8

GERMAN BRUTALITY.

OFFICERS EXPERIENCES. ' PRISON CAMP CRUELTIES. HATRED OF THE BRITISH. A TERRIBLE INDICTMENT. A bbtef epitome of the tragic experiences undergone by himself and other British j officers aster their capture by the Germans at the retreat from Mobs, and darling a subsequent period in prison camps in Germany, was given to a Hthr*tj> representative yesterday by Captain W. Gordon Barker, of the Connaaght Rangers, who arrived at Auckland from England by the Remnera. Captain Barker is visiting New Zealand on sick leave in an endeavour to recover from the shattered condition of health in which his life in a German prison camp has left him. The captain has been visibly affected by the terrible experiences he has undergone. He has been rendered ! speechless, and his nerves are in a very delicate' state, and the information he had to give had perforce to be conveyed to the interviewer by means of pencil and j paper. He had decided to dlfclo* nothing in New Zealand about his ex-J periences, bat was induced to change his mind, in the belief that some particulars as to his story would have the effect of stimulating recruiting. "I was in the retreat from Mens to jLe Catean," wrote the captain, "and my) I regiment was doing rearguard fighting the whele —this is fighting day and j night, with no food or sleep for nearly a week, and marching most of the time. I was left behind at Le Catean, with SO | men, to hold a bridge for several hoars j until our ammunition gave oat, when we i went in with the bayonet. In this charge : we were all practically wiped out, as the ! Germans were five to one. I «as wounded. Germans Refuse Food to Prisoners. That night the Germans came, and collected all those wounded who were lying on the field, and bandaged as up, bat we were left oat I in the rain all night, as there were no waggons.in which to take as away. After i a week in a captured French hospital I smarted, still suffering from my wounds, ! I for Germany. I was pat in a filthy horse 1 . truck with 30 wounded French soldiers,; J and we travelled for three days and nights j across Belgium and Germany. For two! ! days' and nights they absolutely refused to feed as at all, and their Bed Cross was I [as bad. They said they would give noth-! i ing to the English pigs. At every stop' they surged round and spat and hooted at me, and at one place wanted to lynch i me—all this because I was the- only Eng- j ! lishman on the train.

Treated Like Criminals in Germany. "When we arrived in Germany," continued the captain, "I was locked np in j a common cell in an ordinary prison for a week, and was only got out through influence. After that I was sent to a hospital, and finally to Halle camp, where I spent six months. It was the jrorrt officers* camp in Germany. There were 800 Russian, French, Belgian and a few English officers all crowded into a filthy, dirty, disused iron foundry. We slept anything from 40 to 100 in one room, and had 20 dirty tin basins among 800. "The sanitary arrangements were awful, and the food shocking, and we were constantly subjected to every indignity : stripped naked and searched and shouted' j at by sentries, who were especially brutal, to English. The German officers vied with j one another in most cases in being offen- j sive, and, as the American Ambassador] said, treated us more like criminals than officers. When we were moved from one camp to another the crowds hooted and jeered at us, and if the wounded could not walk quickly enough they were struck i and pushed along with rifle butts. j "Our captors always tried to annoy us' with petty annoyances, and even stopped our letters, which were rare enough, for three or four weeks at a time. They opened our parcels under our noses, a<>d took all the food out, saying, 'No luxuries for the English.' At Christmas our parcels, the English'only, were stopped for two months, and we were annoyed in these ways ad infinitum." Incredible Cruelty at Wittenberg. Captain Barker lodges a terrible indictment against the Germans in connection with the almost incredible cruelty and callousness with which they treated pri soners in the camp at Wittenberg. "The men's camps in many places were worse than ours," he continued, "and at Wittenberg the conditions in the first winter were awful. Over 1000 prisoners of all nationalities died of typhus, or in other i words, of dirt, debility, and starvation. | As soon as the disease broke out all the! German officials, including the doctors, j left the camp for three months, and onlv. pushed in food through the barbed-wire I They sent several prisoner doctors there, i six of whom died, three being English doctors, who had gone from our camp at' Halle. One survivor, a Russian doctor, J told me that the dead, living, and dying were all lying crowded in the same bar-rack-rooms on a little dirty straw, and all were covered with vermin. As they died they were buried in the exercise yard. These conditions have only just been made known in England," concluded the captain " Finally, I got so ill that after a three months wait I was exchanged. One never knew if one was going to be exchanged or not, as often they would tell yon that yon were going next dav and then cancel the undertaking at the moment of departure."