GERMAN CRUELTY DENOUNCED.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12084, 13 August 1917, Page 3

GERMAN CRUELTY DENOUNCED.

AMERICAN MINISTER SPEAKS. "Ono of the foulest deeds that history records" (says the ''Daily Chroniclo " of May 18) is how Mr Brand "Whitlock,' American Minister to Belgium, in a tHspatch to his Government written on January 1, describing the deportations of Belgian civilians by ; tlie Germans. On tho roll of the Belgian relief organisation, he says, were some 700,000 unemployed, tho dole providing them with the means of livelihood, and at the same time preventing itheir working for tho Germans. "When JHindrnburg was appointed to the supreme command ho decided to make these -men work, and tho prophecy of a German official, that Belgium would now be .subjected to a more terrible regime and would learn what war was, hap been vindicated.

" One interesting result of the deportations remains to be noted," he writes, li .1 result that once more places in relief the German capacity for blundering, almost as great as the German capacity for cruelty. '' They have dealt a mortal blow to (my prospect they may ever have had of bfiing tolerated by the population of Flanders. In tearing away from nearly every humble hom 0 in the land a husband and a father, or a son and brother, they have lighted a fire of hatred that will never no out; they have brought homo to every heart in the land, in a way that will impress its horror indelibly on tho memory of throo generations, a realisation of what German methods mean, not, as with the early atrocities in the heat of passion and the first bust of war, hut hy one of those deeds that make one despair I of the future of the human race, a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even Genu an of'ficers are now safct to be ashamed." ,