SIDELIGHTS ON THE WAR

New Zealand Tablet, 15 July 1915, Page 17

SIDELIGHTS ON THE WAR

GENERAL. The Jesuit Order has 564 of its members under arms. Thirty-five have been killed, sixty wounded, and seventeen made prisoners. Seven are missing • five have been made Chevaliers of the Legion of Honor; five have received the military medal ; one the Cross of St. George (Russian) ; one the medal for infirmarians : and twentyseven have been cited in the Orders of the Day. The secretary of the Birmingham organisation which provides accommodation and assistance to Belgian refugees reports that practically every able-bodied Belgian (except those who are in military service) is now in employment. Many of them are capable artisans and are engaged in factories which are producing munitions and other war equipment. It is estimated that between 800 and 900 men are engaged in this kind of work in the Birmingham district. The bulk of the men are married, with families, and those who are bachelors and engaged in works are over the age at which they are eligible for service in the Belgian Army. Nearly every available man eligible for such duty has joined or is about to join the Belgian Army in the field.

TROOPER COLIN COWAN, DUNEDIN (Wounded in action at the Dardanelles). CATHOLICS AND PATRIOTISM. The Roll of Honor at St. Mary’s Cathedral, New-castle-on-Tyne (says the Catholic Herald), numbers over 600, and many names arc to be added. Several members of the congregation have given their lives, many are home from the front wounded, and many more are still in the fighting line. A Roll of Honor, comprising over 400 names of members’of the congregation of St. Joseph’s Church, West Hartlepool, who arc serving their country in the army and navy, has been put up in the church. Already six of this number have sacrificed their lives in their country’s cause. PRIESTS IN THE FIRING LINE. An Irish Catholic soldier convalescing at Exeter, on being asked for his opinion as to the facilities for Catholic soldiers at the front, stated that the only minister of religion he ever saw in the fighting line was a Catholic priest. This soldier was in the Battle of Mons, and continued in active service right up to the Neuve Chapelle affair, when he was wounded. He added that the same appeared to be the case in the German lines. One day a young German was shot down near a trench. He was dying, and another sol-

dier came out of the trench to minister to him. The latter proved to be a Bavarian Catholic priest, who there and then administered to the dying soldier the consolation of the Sacraments. THE SHEER SAVAGERY OF GAS POISONING. Mr. Perceval Landon, the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in Northern France, gives an account of a talk with a doctor at one of our clearing hospitals: ‘ I have seen many thousands of wounded men during this war, and the wards have sometimes been filled almost from wall to wall, with desperate cases, but never in my life have I seen so terrible a sight as that of the poisoned men who were brought in the other day.’ He showed me a photograph. ‘You see this photograph of them, but’—he paused‘you would want a cinematograph to make you realise.’ It was a simple phrase, but it flashed up before one's eyes in a second of time the awful fighting for air and life of the writhing men. Hour after hour lire agony was prolonged. A rising tide of suffocation was turning their lungs into a mesh of water. After all, to drown is but a matter of four or five minutes at the most, and the actual struggle is short. Sometimes these men fought for life for fourteen hours. Even Nero is not credited with so foul a horror. Yet our men remained at their posts in the trenches, and faced out the danger till the sure hand of science touched them, and gave them an antidote which is at least as efficacious as that which was served to the terrified Germans who were ordered to commit this atrocity. It is not necessary to repeat here the chemical and medical facts which have been freely described in the English press, the grey, greenish, searching of chlorine," the physical effect upon the lungs, the constitution of antidotes or the actual means employed to diffuse the gas. But as one comes into the region of the war-line, one thanks God as one notices that every tree is faintly—if ever so faintlybent by the prevailing wind in the enemy’s direction. It was a doubleedged weapon indeed that the German Emperor devised . THE ‘GASSED’ CANADIANS. Similar testimony is borne in a message from a correspondent at the British Headquarters in France: ‘ During the six months that I have been out here I have seen many thousands of wounded, but never have I seen a more hideous sight than the sufferings of the Canadians who were “gassed” at Ypres. To see all those brave fellows lying gasping in the sunshine outside the hospital, struggling with heaving chest to get their breath, was a heartrending spectacle and one which aroused feelings of the deepest resentment against those responsible for such an outrage.’ In these words did the medical officer of a casualty clearing station express his opinion of the latest method of warfare adopted by the Germans. In order to demonstrate to me clearly the exact effect of the vapor on the lungs the doctor showed me the lungs which had been removed from one of the victims. The whole organ was soddened and weighed about four times its normal weight. It had all the appearance of the lungs of an old man, and in many places, as a result of the efforts of the sufferer to gain breath, the whole lung had been torn away from the surrounding tissue. GERMAN OUTRAGES IN BELGIUM. We gave last week (says the London Tablet) the general conclusions arrived at by Lord Bryce’s Committee of Inquiry into the outrages committed by German troops in Belgium. The evidence on which the report is based consists of carefully sifted depositions of Belgian refugees and soldiers and of the diaries of German soldiers. Of the countless outrages on women and girls, so horrible were they, we can give no instances in these columns but we append some extracts from the report which will prove the murder of priests, the systematic firing of buildings, and massacre of the people.

Massacre: at Liege.

Here is a description ; of -what happened at Liege: Entries in a German, diary show that on the 19th the German soldiers gave themselves up to debauchery in the streets of Liege, and on the night of the 20th (Thursday) a massacre took place in the streets, beginning near the Cafe Carpentier, at which , there is . said to have been a dinner attended by Russian and other students. . . . Though the cause of the massacre is in dispute, the results are known with certainty. The Rue des Pitteurs and houses in the Place de I’Universite and the Quai des Pecheurs were systematically fired with benzine, and many inhabitants were burnt alive in their houses, their efforts to escape being prevented by rifle fire. Twenty people were shot, while trying to escape, before the eyes of one of the witnesses. The Liege Fire Brigade turned out but was not allowed to extinguish the fire. Its carts, however, were usefully employed in removing heaps of civilian corpses to the Town Hall. ' The fire burnt on through the night and the murders continued on the following day, the 21st. Thirty-two civilians were killed on that day in the Place de I’Universite alone.. Shooting at Namur. Similar barbarity was practised at Namur, which was entered on August 24. Says the report: The troops signalised their entry by firing on a crowd of 150 unarmed unresisting civilians, ten alone of whom escaped. A witness of good standing who was in Namur describes how the town was set on fire systematically in six different places. As the inhabitants fled from the burning houses they were shot by the German troops. Not less than 140 houses were burnt. On the 25th, the hospital at Namur was set on fire with inflammable pastilles, the pretext being that soldiers in the hospital had fired upon the Germans. A Funeral Pyre. As an instance of depraved cruelty the following may be cited ; At Monceau-sur-Sambre, on the 21st August, a young man of eighteen was shot in his garden. His father and brother were seized in their house and shot in the courtyard of a neighboring country house. The son was shot first. The father was compelled to stand close to the feet of his son’s corpse and to fix his eyes upon him while he himself was shot. The corpse of the young man shot in the garden was carried into the house and put on a bed. The next morning the Germans asked where the corpse was. When they found it was in the house, they fetched straw, packed it "round the bed on which the corpse was lying and set fir© to it and burnt the house down. A great many houses were burnt in Monceau. Massacre of the Innocents. The murder of civilians seems to have been frequently indiscriminate. Sometimes some sort of selection was made, but too frequently meither age nor sex was spared. Here are examples of the way in which children were done to death; At Eppeghem the dead body of a child of two was seen pinned to the ground with a German lance. One witness describes how she saw a Belgian boy of fifteen shot on the village green at Famines, and a day or two later, on the same green, a little girl and her two brothers (name given) who were looking at the German soldiers, were killed before her eyes for no apparent reason. The principal massacre at Famines took place about August 23. A witness describes how he saw the public square littered with corpses, and after a search found those of his wife and child, a little girl of seven. A hairdresser at Ardenne was murdered in his kitchen where he was sitting with a child on each knee. On a side road at Hofstade the corpse of a civilian was seen on his doorstep with a bayonet wound in his stomach, and by his side the dead body of a boy of five with his hands nearly severed. The corpses of a woman and boy were seen at the blacksmith’s. They had been killed with the bayonet.

•At Boort Meerbeek a: German soldier was seen. to fire three times at a little girl of five years old. / Having failed to hit her, he subsequently bayoneted her. He was killed with the butt. end of a rifle by a Belgian soldier who had seen him commit this murder from a distance. Another witness saw a little girl . of seven, at Dinant, one of whose legs was broken and the other injured by a bayonet. 111-treatment-and Murder of Priests. Though the report contains no special division dealing with attacks pn and murders of the clergy, mention of such things are scattered over its pages. We may take the following’'as examples: German soldiers had arrived on the 15th at Blegny Trembleu and seized a quantity of wine. On the 16th prisoners were taken; four, including the priest and the burgomaster, were shot. The second occasion' on which large numbers of prisoners were put there was shortly after the battle of Malines, and it was then that the priest of Gelrode was brought to Aerschot church, treated abominably and finally murdered. One witness describes the scene graphically : The whole of the prisonersmen, women, and childrenwere placed in the church. Nobody was allowed to go outside the church to obey the calls of nature. The church had to be used for that purpose.

SAPPER FRANCIS GEORGE PEARSON, DUNEDIN (Killed in action at the Dardanelles). We were afterwards allowed to go outside the church for this purpose, and then I saw the clergyman of Gelrode standing by the wall of the church with his hands above his head, being guarded by soldiers.’ The actual details of the murder of the priest are as follows: The priest was struck several times by the soldiers on the head. He was pushed up against the wall of the church. , ~ . An hour after the same witness saw the priest still standing there. He was then led away by the Germans a distance of about fifty yards. There, with his face against the wall of a house, he was shot by five soldiers. A priest was taken on the Friday morning, August 28, and placed at the head of a number of refugees from Wygmael. He was led through Louvain, abused and ill-treated, and placed with some thousands of other people in the riding school in the Rue du Manege. The glass roof broke in the night from the heat of burning buildings round. Next day the prisoners were marched through the country with an armed guard.