GUERILLA WARFARE.

Taranaki Daily News, 17 February 1916, Page 4

GUERILLA WARFARE.

GERMANS REAP THE WHIRLWIND. Guerilla bands have sprung up against the Germans owing to the latter's deeds of violence, pillage and murder. In the Pinsk marshes' whole regiments of Volhynian.partisans (says a writer in the Bourse Gazette) have been brought into the field by a local landed proprietor, and In Southern Polesie the enemy is compelled to reamin constantly on the alert. Between 40 and 50 formidable detachments are now operating in Polesie.

At first the men comprising these bauds were armed for the most part with axes and scythes, and only a few carried rifles. The majority of them are local feasants, who know every path in the district in which they operate. (After every raid they conceal their movements so well'that there has not been a single case in which the Germans have managed to overtake them.

The most popular partisan detach, ments are those df Yan Topolnitzsky, Ignatius Zaboltka, and Igor Okrini'tchouk. The Topolnitzsky band numbers 40 men, who operate on foot. The head of this band is an elderly man, a refugee from the Government of Kalisch. Until July he lived with his wife and 18-year-old daughter, but the Germans descended on the place and Topollnitzsky's -wife was killed. The girl was seized and carried off, and Topolnitzsky fled into the forest, where he met men as desperate as himself.

One evening a peasant, captured by the soldiers of a Landwehr regiment, told the officer that he knew where Topolnitzsky's band was hiding. "They are sleeping, and you can seize them all alive," he said. The German officer left about 40 men behind, and went with the peasant and a force of liiO men to take the bold leader. The guide led the Germans into the marches and then disappeared. At the snme time volley? came from both flanks, and the Germans fell in scores. Only 50 escaped. Tn the meantime the village which harbored the remaining Germans was set on fire by the guerrilla chief.

The Austro-Germans have had cause also to fear the chief of another band, Ignatius Zabolotka, a peasant. Should this man fall into their hands, they would probably invent some peculiarly horrible form of death for him. Tlic Germans captured a member of his band and'hung him. A note was pinned to his clothes which stated in bad Tinssian that his fate would he shared by all those who injured the German soldiers. Soon the Germans who were quartered in the village of Vignaviky wore fitartlci] by seeing the body (if their colonel hanging from a tree near his hut. ' A lieutenant and eight soldiers were hanging from other trees close bv.

Okrinitcliouk's detachment lias been operating for some time in the neighborhood of Kovel.