Newspaper Page Text
i
Cerman S lavery
st .Chateau in France Was Occupled
by Hindenburg and Others in High
q:ommand, Reveals for the First Time /
' the Details of Unsuspected Savagery /
lfiehind the German Lines in Devastated .
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“Quick march!”’ commanded the officer. With German
bayonets prodding them, the prisoners staggered along
and the dreadful procession turned the next street corner.
Then 1 heard the peculiar tooting of an automobile
horn used in the German army to give warning of the
approach of a distinguished personage. In another sec
ond a monster field gray military automobile rolled past
me. On the driver’s seat and steps were four solcfiers
with rifles ready for use.
Leaning back luxuriously on the rear seat was
Prince Eitel Frederick. An aide-de-camp faced the Prince
and the rest of the roomy car was filled up with packages
of various kinds.
I kuew what they were, The Prince was noted as the
most successful burglar in the German army. He was
coming from the direction of Cambrai and his packages
represented a few choice pieces of loot from a great
chateau in that vieinity, pieces of loot which he wished
to keep in his own imperial hands. The rest of the plun.
der had been crated and sent to Berlin by freight train,
according to his custom.
It was to avoid littering the road in frout of this im
perial burglar with the bodies of men, women and chil
dren that the officers hastened on the prisoners’ convoy
and omitted the threatened massacre.
It was my fate to see many thousands of prisoners in
many stages of misery and agony during the war A new
Dante is needed to tell the whole story of that ‘‘lnferno’
of suffering. 1 mention a few episodes not because they
were marked by more cruelty than the Germans showed
in thousands of other cases, but because certain dramatic
features have engraved them on my memory,
Never shall I forget the caged English aviator whom
I saw at the Cambrai military station. 1 had obtained
permission, &s a great favor, from the local German com.
mander to make the trip to Cambrai to obtain some com
mon drugs. They were entirely used up in our town, and
the lack of them caused me intolerable discomfort. Cam
brai is a large city, and after a search of its surviving
pharmacies I was able to obtain a small part of what I
needed.
i ik AV¢ The railway station at Cambrai was, of course, a
e\c\l Iy. ° eentre of German military activity, With my pass from
France Which
Stands Un-~
paralleled by
Anything in
History
Women and children in the in
vaded portion of France being
served wz:th a small dole of food
by the Germans in a freight. car.
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my local commander 1 was entitled to enter the station
and take a train when movements of troops did not in
terfere. The pass required me to return to my home
before nightfall, otherwise I should be subject to severe
penalties. I had little temptation to run away, for before
me lay the trenches and behind me Germany.
Having passed the cordon of sentries around the sta
tion, I went to the platform. The station was filled with
a large detachment of British prisoners about to be for
warded to some prison camp.
While most of the poor fellows sat around or stood
under guard, my attention was arvested by the special
treatment given to one of them. He was a young British
officer, and the Germaus had shut him up in one of the
wooden cages used in this region for sending pigs by
railroad. The cage had wooden bars on all sides, set
several inches apart. It was not high enough to permit
a 4 man to stand up, and the occupant sat in it with his
back against the bars. The cage was standing on a kind
of truck, ready to be transferred to a railway carriage
I knew by the officer’s uniform that he was an aviator,
We saw Allied aviators flying overhead constantly and
could see the German shells exploding about them. It
was easy to guess that his machine had been shot down
while he was bombing or reconnoitring near Cambrai,
I afterward heard that the reason for treating him
with special eruelty was his supposed relationship to Mr,
Asquith, the British Prime Minister at the outbreak of
the war.
I could see that he was a very handsome young man
of about twenty-five. He bore his ordeal with remark
able stoicism,
On the platfora stood an old French peasant woman,
supplied with a pass to travel, like myself. Moved by
pity, she handed some fruit through the bars to the young
officer, who was doubtless suffering from thirst,
A German feldwebel, in charge of the platform,
stepped up to the cage and struck the old woman in the
face with his fist, knocking her down.
“You old fool, we didn’t put him there to be fed!”’
roared the brute. ‘‘l'l] make the rotten English swine
squeal |’
With that he Jeaned against the bars and spat at the
prisoner |
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Other German soldiers danced around the cage like
" drunken savages and bawled insults at the prisoner, such
as ‘‘English pig-dog! Dirty coward!”’
I turned away sick at heart and overwhelmed by my
feeling of helplessness.
Not many yards away two superior German officers,
decorated and very immaculately dressed, were marching
up and down. They must have realized that disorderly
conduet was going on, but they paid no attention.
During the early Summer of 1917 I observed that the
Germans were following a different policy in dealing
with their prisoners. It was not a change for the better,
but for the worse. We no longer heard of convoys of
prisoners passing through our neighborhood for the in
terior. Prisoners taken here were kept near the front
and others were sent from the interior to live under fire.
The truth was that lack of manpower, failure of
transportation and other difficulties were beginning to
tell severely on the Germans They were keeping their
prisoners at the front to dig trenches and to do other
military work. In this way thev saved the labor of their
own soldiers and the transportation of fheir prisoners.
That they were acting in notorious violation of the inter
national rules of war meant nothing to the Germans,
From my old gardener I learned many details concern
ing the treatment of prisoners in our sector, He had
gathered some of them from an escaped French soldier
whom he had sheltered for three nights in my garden
gummer-house unknown to the German officers who were
living in my chateau. There was, inrdeed, no attempt by
the Germans to conceal their cruelties to their prisoners,
Indeed, they displayed them ostentatiously as a warning
to such citizens of Allied countries as might be living in
the vicinity.
The escaped soldier was one of about two hundred
French prisoners who had been assigned for foreed labor
behind the German lines at Bourlon, near Cambrai. The
unfortunate prisoners were foreed to sleep in cowsheds
that were falling to pieces. Their food consisted of rotten
“The German officers dragged the pretty young Baroness de Rijcke
out of her bathroom, stripped her of her bathrobe and compelled
her to ride at the front of the column across the moonlit road.
Townspeople saw the strange, brutal sight—the Baroness
whom all of them knew by sight, riding devoid of cloth- /
~. Ing, astride a horse at the head of a column of Uhlans.” ,/
meat and bread, given to them in such amounts as barely
to keep them alive. When they seemed on the point of
dying from hunger their masters gave them a few swedes,
regular cattle food, :
Their work consisted in enlarging a front-line trench
in a very vital and dangerous sector, They were driven
there at the point of the bayonet before daybreak to
escape observation by the other side. A large number
of them refused to do the work when they found what it
was and were promptly shot. The others were forced to
work by bayonet jabs.
The Allies soon discovered that new work was going
on in the trench and showered the spot with high ex
plosive shells, so that one entire working party of pris
oners was annihilated. The Germans n the trench were
few in number and placed far apart. Their loss was
consequently small,
One day an Allied aviator’s bomb struck one of the
sheds where fifty of the prisoners were kept, killing sev
eral and wounding many more. Our escaped soldier was
among the injured.
The German officer in command, my informant said,
ordered the survivors to enlarge the hole made by the
bomb. Then at his command the German soldiers thrust
the bodies of dead and wounded into the hole and
shovelled the earth over them.
Our man happened to be more stunned than injured.
When he recovered consciousness he found himself buried
alive. By a fortunate accident he had not been buried
deeply, and by hard struggling he succeeded in shaking
himself free. It was then dark and he was able to make
his escape.
Such stories of cruelty would appear incredible if they
were few in number, but we who have lived near the
front have seen or heard of innumerable cases fully as
atrocious as these,
(To Be Continued Next Sunday)