WAR-TIME EXECUTIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21167, 27 April 1932, Page 11

WAR-TIME EXECUTIONS.

A GERMAN VIEWPOINT. " COULD NOT BE JUSTIFIED." LONDON, April 17. Commenting, in the latest published volume of his memoirs, on the shooting, of Nurse Cavell and Captain Fryatt, the late rrince von Bulow, at one time Chancellor, declares that the usefulness of such punishments was incommensurata with tho moral obloquy incurred and that therefore they could not be justified* "Frightfulness," he says, "is a bad method of waging war." The latest volume of the memoirs is likely to arouse greater controversy than the earlier volumes. The most startling charge in a book filled with bitterness is that the Belgians officially manufactured stories of German atrocities. When seeking to persuade Italy to enter the war, ho says, the Belgians arranged for the sale of little statues of the Madonna gazing pityingly, and a kneeling child raising its bleeding wrists and praying the Holy Mother to make whole again the hands which the barbarous Germans had hacked off. Von Bulow asserts that no German soldier ever mutilated a French or a Belgian child. "I do not think," he says, "there ever lias been an army better disciplined, stricter, or more essentially humane. "Our neglect of the signed obligation with respect to Belgium—the bad effect of which was aggravated by the clumsy Reichstag speech of the Chancellor (Beth-mann-Hollweg), and made still worse by his wretched description of international treaties as 'scraps of paper'—definitely harmed us in Italy and elsewhere, and the Belgian propaganda easily aroused sympathy for a Belgium traitorously assailed." Von Bulow reveals how Emperor Francis Joseph flew into a rage when tho Pope's emissary attempted to convey the Pope's appeal to stop hostilities. Ha refused to allow the cardinal to finish. 1 seized him by an arm, and thrust him from the'room.