GERMANS IN FRANCE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XL, Issue 12541, 12 May 1915, Page 3

GERMANS IN FRANCE.

An English lady, signing herself Violet. Bryce, wrote thus to the "Morning Post" from' the North of France last month : "1 have read with interest the letters you have published strongly condemning ..the large sums of money that are being spent in England in housing German officers, prisoners of war, in the most Injurious • way. Being myself only some fifteen kilometres from the front; and having seen the ruthless devastation, - and heard at first hand of the honors unspeakable that the German officers have allowed their men to commit, I feel I must add my voice to what 1 trust will very, soon become so strong a volume of public disapproval that the military authorities will have 1 to take notice of it. ■'.

"This town (which must be namchss), where-I have spent a month, was i:ot given over to pillage because the German Emperor, for reasons of his own, wanted it kept .intact. But during.the investment by the Germans, which lasted t'lL'.een days, there was scarcely a sober- German in the' town. For days after they "left it was dangerous to walk in the streets on account of-broken bottles, and an inhabitant truly described the town as more like hell let loose than anything imaginable. The German officers stood in front of any house that was shut, the owners having tied, and watched their men not only pillaging it, but wantonly destroying everything, so as to make the house and contents unusable. Whenever they passed through the few small villages in the neighbouring countryside they burnt the houses for the mere love of destruction. lln the town where I am staying very

many girls are enciente, the result, so 1 am assured, of fiendish forethought on the part of the Germans, who made lists Ioik; beforehand, divided into classes._ of the available women and girls of the district. "A French nurse here told me she was taken prisoner early in the war and sent to Cologne,. where, although well treated herself, she saw the most dreadful things

done to prisoners, especially English prisoners. The ueople who have been through the German horror speak in the most calm and dignified.way of what has been done ■but one listens m vain for any trace of humanity on the part of Les Boches. My landlady", a charming women of over sixty, had'a revolver put to her head because she spobi a few words in English to the wife of the English chaplain, "Everything was

I savage—utterly savage. Some of our party i run a canteen in a town not far from hero, and tin.- chateau where they lodge was commandeered by German officers, who during the thirteen days of their occupation drunk 2,500 bottles of stolen champaane. so that one is not surprised to hear from the concierge that not one of them was ever -sober during their stay. The officers who visited the tennis club here, because tliev found nothing they cartd to loot, collected all the nets, racquets, etc., put them in a heap, and poured unspeakable fifth upon them. "I am not going into details of many frightful atrocities of which f have been told at first hand. I only wish to urge as stronaly as 1 can that these Leasts are not worths* of being treated as wc are treating those of them who are our prisoners in England. And we shall get no thanks; it will not make them treat our men any better; they will simply take it as the acknowledged right of the greatest nation on earth '" 1 would like to add that my experience is that everyone who has been anywhere near the French frontier—it is the same s'.ory of sava-ery everywhte."