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Waikato Times, Volume 89, Issue 13895, 22 October 1918, Page 5

UNKNOWN

A TERRIBLE INDICTMENT. FROM THE EMANCIPATED CITIES. (Australian and N.Z. Cable Assn.) Received October 22, 8.50 a.m. LONDON, October 21. War correspondents draw terrible pen pictures of the Germans' brutality on the emancipated cities. Mr Beach Thomas writes:—The l)lood and agony of British prisoners and Franco-Belgian women cry from the streets of all these towns. Rev. Morthe, the British chaplain in Lille, who saw the black noleprison with its shifting population of 800 prisoners, who was present daily a* the progressive deaths of starved and bullied men, who read the burial service over 200 Englishmen who died of oppression, lias corroborators from Bohain to Ostend among the self-sacri-ficing men and women who suffered blows and imprisonment in their endeavours to save the prisoners from starvation. They saw men tumble in the streets from sheer inanition. The Germans who indulged in reprisals fur invented crimes shelled civilians in a village near Lille because a French ship bombarded Alexandretta. They gave British prisoners no food for three days because, so they paid. German prisoners were under sliell--11 re at the Somme.

] have sworn testimony from Lille. Tourroing and Rotibaix that they snatched in the middle of the night thousands of women away. Dying men were left alone, and many could no! bid farewell to Iheir daughters. For six months they had no news of them, and the first the- heard was the return of their once innocent daughters, aged, dirty and worn after month's of forced labour in lllthy. ''"id barracks Roubaix ami Tourcoing alone supplied 1800 of th.es • women slaves. Tie' German brutality was only exceeded by their meanness. They gutted everv house and factory and paid nothing except for food and drink, for wide!' they naid uuarler price in paper I went to a convent of h n-liinv sisters to see i friend, "is it iva"ii;> four years." I asked, "since you had news." She answered, "four years and seven days." No whisper of the fate of nearest and dearest had readied them, nor had their letters gone. The Germans sold them special postcards

at bidi prices and then destroyed the mail. This is the sort of moneygrubbing brutality to which the civilians were treated. A FAMILY MURDERED. BEFORE THE OCCUPATION OF ROULERS. (Australian and N.Z. and Renter.) Received October 22, S'.o a.m. NEW YORK, October 21.

Mr Duranty, the Times' correspondent on the French front, says that the Germans at Roulers perpetrated a tragedy almost unique even in the records of German cruelty. When the order was given for the inhabitants to leave their houses because the Allies were advancing, a farmer with his wife and three children remained. The Gernians found them and butchered them in their own farmyard,-where their bodies were discovered by the French cavalry a few hours later. The, majority of the 25,000 inhabitants were compelled to leave' Roulers witli the retreating Oennans, and only 100 of the population remained.