ESTABLISHED 1866. The Marlborough Express PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1917. THE UNSPEAKABLE HUN.

Marlborough Express, Volume LI, Issue 87, 14 April 1917, Page 4

ESTABLISHED 1866. The Marlborough Express PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1917. THE UNSPEAKABLE HUN.

Tho fact that Germany now threatens that if she has "to evacuate France and Belgium the occupied territories will be turned into a desert" affords the-plainest possible proof that the German Military Staff i? seriously concerned over the British .successes 'of this week. The threat will not deter tho French from the heartiest and most determined cooperation with the British in forcing the enemy out of. North-eaetern France Nothing that the -Hurt can do in. the "occupied territories" can be much worse than what he has done already, and the infliction of further barbaric destruction of property behind his piTsent lines will only pile vp ' the already stupendous bill of damages which after the war he will be compelled, to .meet in full, even if the German Crown jewels have to be sold and every German banker., merchant, and manufacturer be reduced to a state of financial ruin Before, however, the monetary .indemnity conies to be. paid, there is every probability that the French will wreak, in blood and .fire, a very practical vengeance upon their unspeakably savage and mean enemies... The day will come, sooner or later, when it will be. the% turn of German villages to be burned, of German churches to be laid in ruins, of Gorman crops to be uprooted and destroyed-—maybe, fiven, of German non-combatants to be wantonly shot down,. From a strictly moral and humanitarian point v-f view the infliction of such a penalty may be deplored, but when the innumerable acts of savage, cruelty which have been perpetrated by the Germans in France arc remembered who could reasonably blame J>he French ( if they followed the Biblical injunction, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and ga,ve the German civil population a taste' of the same horrors which, "long-suffering villagers of North-eastern France havehad to end lira during the war? ■"Whilst.-on--this, subject of-Gorman barbarity we shall be echoing, we feel sure, the opinion of our readers, pne and nil,-that-somo stepsr should be taken by the. British Government, when once it becomes possible, to avenge the foul treatment meted out to the British wounded by certain of the enemy's Red Cross nurses. These wretched creatures, oblivious of all those feelings of humanity which, in a Red Cross nursey should, and are, outside Germany, specially developed, seem to have vied with each other in deliberately insulting and brutally ili-tr&atirtpc the poor wounded British soldiers who were unhappy enough to come under their so-called "care." We read of thes<? vile people spitting into the wounded wen's soup; torturing them by holding out wateir and food to tho sufferers, only to snatch it ■away again; there is even testimony of more shocking things in the v ay of kicking tho wounded and crippled men. Wherever it be possible the German medical men and head nursos who enn be proved to have been, in command of these cruel viragoes fhould be most severely punishnd. Flogging would bo the mast suitable penalty which could be inflicted, but in any case, wherever personal guilt can be sheeted home no mercy should be shown. And here let us say that should the New Zealand Government receive well substantiated ervidonce that ono single New Zealand soldier has been insulted or maltreated in the way recorded by tho Borne correspondent of the Times (as published in our cablegrams on Thursday last), practical reprisals shxmld bo made here in the, Dominion, either by placing some prominent German now interned on Somes Island, in Wellington Harbor, in close confinement and on a diet .of bread and .water, or, which might be preferable, confiscating certain permanently German-owned property in this country.