Part 18

About June, 1917, a party of about twenty English soldiers came in who had been working behind the German lines on the western front. I became friends with one of them. He was so weak that I have several times seen him faint on parade. Another of them told me that he was one of a party of 100 working behind the lines on the western front digging trenches and carrying up supplies. He said they were all very badly treated and starved. They were knocked about by the Germans if they did not march as fast as they wanted them to, although they were all so weak. He was only sent to Germany when he became so weak as to be useless for work. When I left he did not look as if he could lift a shovelful of sand. There was another whom I knew. He had also been working behind the lines. They had to work in clogs and no socks. He said they used to tie rags round their feet. He was employed on road making. I never could have believed the things I was told but for the terrible state the men were in, which caused me to feel that no horror I was told was impossible.

Many were brought into the camp who had returned from working behind the lines; they were in a shocking state, literally skin and bones, hardly able to walk, and quite worn out physically and mentally; their clothes threadbare and in rags, without boots, wearing old rag slippers. They told me that the conditions of work behind the lines, where some of them had been for months, were terrible; they had to work eight hours a day, and generally were made to walk ten kilometers out to their work, and the only food they were given was one cup of coffee, a slice of bread, and some soup a day--a day's ration.

"Shot at Sight"

From another camp comes the following testimony:

In May of this year a large party of British came into the camp, who had returned from behind the German lines. They were ravenous through being starved, and half savages. I spoke to several of them. * * * Men were shot at sight for a slight cause, such as dropping out to get bread from Belgian civilians. The state in which they returned was the worst sight I have seen in my life. Their clothes were ragged, they were half shaven, verminous, suffering from skin diseases, and were half savage with hunger and bad treatment. After their arrival the commandant in the camp issued an order (which I saw) that no more of these parties should be taken through the main street of the town, but should go by the byways on account of the feeling that had been caused among the population. I am told that the population showed a great deal of sympathy, tears, &c.

About May 1, 1917, about 300 prisoners of all nationalities were brought from behind the western lines. I spoke to those who came into the lazaret. All were starving, and had been kept there until they collapsed from overwork. Fifteen Russians died as soon as they were brought in. One man told me that on a march of eleven kilometers a man fell out ill, the guard gave him so many minutes to fall in again, and told him he would shoot him if he was not up by then; he could not go on, and the guard shot him.

From a third camp:

I knew two of our men who had been working behind the German lines in the west for five months. One was 29 years old, the other 25. The first weighed 180 pounds when captured. He left the firing line too weak to walk, and weighed 110 pounds. He was badly treated and knocked about. When I saw him in camp he was black and blue. The other man had the same treatment. They were both starved, and both were gray-headed with the five months' treatment. These men said our men were dying there every day through hardship and exposure. The food behind the lines was about half the camp rations.

"Worked to the Bone"

From a fourth camp:

In September, 1917, seventy-five noncommissioned officers, who had been behind the lines, were brought into our camp. They were in a bad physical condition, hungry, lousy, and worked out. One month after, a large body, all privates from behind the lines, captured since May, came in. They were in a terrible condition, famished beyond words. They had been worked to the bone, and were in a filthy condition. They made our camp lousy. The camp doctor said they were the worst cases he had seen, and said they could stay in bed for a week. They were so famished that two died of eating the food we gave them. They had been working on the Hindenburg line, and the railway Cambrai to Lille, and repairing it under fire. They said they were on very small rations and compelled to work. They told us that Frenchwomen who out of compassion gave them any trifling gift of fruit were knocked down by the sentries.

From the same camp:

I spoke to men who had been kept at work behind the German lines on the western front. The majority of these were there about twelve months, and they came into camp about the end of November or the beginning of December, 1917. They told me that they had been employed close up to the lines. They had been employed cutting trees, and had been under our own shellfire. They were half starved and in a terrible condition. On one occasion about 300 came in, about forty of whom had British clothes, the rest being dressed in odds and ends of French and German clothing--in fact, anything they could get hold of. We collected bread for them and cut it up in readiness for their arrival so as to save all possible time, but their hunger was so great they could not help raiding us and fighting for it. It was terrible to see them. I do not think many of them had been wounded, but their condition was so terrible that I cannot describe it.

They were absolutely the worst bunch of men I had ever seen. They were terribly thin and weak, and fell down as soon as they started to eat, as they were in an absolutely exhausted state. Their underclothing was in a dreadful state, and they were covered with vermin, and had been like that for about twelve months. This is the party which I mentioned as coming to the camp about the end of November or the beginning of December, 1917. About a fortnight after their arrival, and after their clothes had been fumigated and they had baths two or three times a week, they picked up wonderfully.

From a fifth camp:

In March, 1917, I saw fifty English prisoners come in to camp who had been working behind the lines near Cambrai digging trenches; they had been there three or four months. All of them were in a shocking condition, absolutely starved, with boils and sores all over them. We used to share our parcels with these men. During the whole time I was in camp--that is, up to December last--men were drifting in who had been working behind the lines on the western front; they always arrived in the same shocking condition. I remember particularly one, in November, 1917, coming back from Cambrai district. He was very bad and starved; he told me they had been very badly treated; all huddled together in barns, no sanitary arrangements, no blankets, and he said he had seen a native woman shot for giving them food; that they were well within range of guns, and within six kilometers of the lines, shells frequently falling about them, and that he had seen many of his own comrades wounded while working, that they were knocked about by their guards, and, generally, his account of their treatment was appalling. To my knowledge from conversation with them, men were coming in who had been working close up behind the lines right down to the time I left Germany in December, 1917.

From an army Chaplain:

On Feb. 16, 1917, there arrived in Minden Hospital sixteen men who had been working behind the western front, attached to Camp E.K. 5. The thermometer registered 10 degrees, Fahrenheit, below zero. They had walked seven kilometers from the station. Their clothing consisted of tunic, trousers, and thin shirt, boots and socks, and an old hat--no coat and no underclothes. They had been two days and two nights in the cold train with very little to eat. * * * Two of these men died later of consumption in Minden. They had all been captured in November (this was February) and their relatives did not know that they were even alive. These men report, too, that they are brutally treated; human life is not worth so much as horseflesh, because the latter can be eaten. They are worked until they either die or so completely collapse that they are useless. I believe this was the first party that arrived from the western front. I had the names of the men in a notebook, but it was taken from me. They said it was nothing to wake up in the morning and find the man sleeping beside you dead. I got the names of several who had died, and wrote to their people to inform them.

Lives Made Unbearable

The committee close these statements with the following striking extract from the evidence of a young wounded British officer who was placed in a ward in a German hospital in France, filled with prisoners of all nationalities:

The German in charge of the ward was a university professor, and, seeing several of our men, also Russians and Rumanians, come on to the hospital in an emaciated condition, I asked him the cause, and where they came from, when, without giving me details, he told me they came from working camps behind the lines. There, he said, the conditions were frightful, so much so that he himself was ashamed of them--the men were overworked, under shellfire, very much underfed, had not much clothing, and slept in sheds and shelters in the snow under filthy conditions. I ascertained from him and from some of our own men that many died behind the lines; all were thoroughly ill-treated by the Germans, and the lives of those who did not die were made quite unbearable.

I am sure the German who informed me had no personal grounds which made him complain against the system, it was merely on humanitarian grounds that he told me he was shocked; and the independent stories I received from our own soldiers simply bore out the fact that the Germans were ill-treating their prisoners behind the lines at this time. While I was in hospital the German I have mentioned above did his best to get the men from the hospital marked unfit for work behind the lines; and I must in fairness add that as a result very few, if any, went back to work there once they had been sent to hospital, and they seemed to be marked for camps in Germany instead.

The report concludes: "The committee in their survey of the evidence dealt with in this report have failed to find a trace even of lip service either to the obligations so solemnly undertaken by the German Government in time of peace for regulating their conduct in time of war or to these principles from their War Book which that Government professed as their own. Further comment appears to the committee to be superfluous. The facts speak for themselves."

American Prisoners Exploited

_A correspondent sent the following from The Hague, April 20, 1918, regarding the German treatment of American prisoners:_

From irrefutable evidence obtained by your correspondent, it is impossible to close one's eyes to what is going on in the hospitals and prisoners' camps in Germany. It is a mistake to believe that the treatment of prisoners and wounded in Germany has improved. On the contrary, it is as bad as it ever was, even worse.

The punishments inflicted are cruel and inhuman. As is well known, prisoners are absolutely dependent upon parcels for food and clothing. A favorite punishment is to withhold these from a whole camp or from large bodies of prisoners. It has been established beyond doubt that prisoners are employed behind the front and are under shellfire, in defiance of The Hague agreement of 1917.

Some prisoners never reach a camp in Germany for six months, meanwhile receiving no parcels of food. Their condition on arrival at camp, broken down and starving, is pitiable.

The evidence doesn't tend to show that American prisoners are receiving any preferential treatment. It is reported that the first American prisoners taken were hawked about the country, presumably to show them off to the populace. At Giessen, where, it would seem, American prisoners were kept on two separate occasions, they were prohibited any intercourse, even by sign language, with other prisoners and were not allowed to receive parcels or gifts from them.

British prisoners at Giessen asked if they could give parcels to Americans, and finally received permission to do so the following day. But the next day the American prisoners were moved away early in the morning.

British prisoners were able to detect Americans who had been captured any length of time by their appearance and by the state of their clothes. Until parcels for them arrived from Berne their state was deplorable.

A British noncommissioned officer recently obtained the signatures of the first ten Americans captured and talked with them. These men signed the scrap of paper in the hope that some news of them would reach the outside world. They were in poor physical health and somewhat despondent.

A few recent examples from a large amount of sworn evidence follow:

In February, 1918, 4,000 men were sent from a Westphalian camp to within thirty kilometers behind the front. Their guards ran away to escape the British shrapnel fire.

The state of prisoners coming from the big Somme battle in the first week of the present month was deplorable. Their wounds had not been dressed in many cases for more than ten days. Owing to the lack of dressing, British comrades bandaged their wounds with old towels and shirts.

It was formally announced by the German authorities in Camp Bonn on April 13 last that two British soldiers, R. and B., had been shot near Minden for not stopping talking when ordered to do so.

In November, 1917, men were brought into the hospital at M. continually, having been wounded by shrapnel from behind the lines. Wounded men lay for three or four weeks unattended and grossly neglected.

Much of the sworn evidence is so repugnant that it could not be published. There has been talk of reprisals on American prisoners, and even foreigners born in America are included in these threatened reprisals.

Total Destruction of Rheims

By G. H. Perris

_With the French Armies, April 20, 1918_

The great fire at Rheims has nearly burned itself out. Having thrown in a week 50,000 explosive and an unknown number of incendiary and gas shells, the German gunners ceased as suddenly and inexplicably as they had begun, and when I entered the city this morning the silence of death brooded over it.

The written word is powerless to describe such a spectacle, and it is no more adequate for being unmeasured. But when men of faith, men who love the old and beautiful, write under the fresh, stunning impression of such a sight, is it strange that some loose phrases escape them?

I am very familiar with the ruins of Rheims. From the first bombardment, which destroyed the exquisite sculptures of the north tower and the façade of the cathedral three and a half years ago, I have been able to watch the mischief extending step by cruel step. At first, with normal British reluctance to credit the outrageous or incomprehensible, one was chiefly concerned to find out whether, after all, there was not some sort of military excuse. I severely cross-examined every one who could be supposed to know anything about the matter. There never was any shadow of excuse.

It remained only to record from time to time the progress of a crime as deliberate as any in the annals of the war, and in its own kind

## particularly damnable--a blackhearted crime such as a Comanche chief or

a Congo cannibal would not have had the wickedness to conceive.

And if there be still any rationalist obstinate enough to ask for the reason why of this last outburst of vandalism, I can only hazard the guess that it may have been planned, like the long-distance bombardments of Paris, as a terroristic accompaniment of the Hindenburg offensive. It may have been supposed that the tales of the refugees would help to demoralize Paris and the rest of the country. So little after these terrible years has the boche learned of the people he set out to conquer.

Well, the Cathedral of St. Louis is not falling. Wonderful was the work of the builders. More buttresses, pinnacles, gargoyles, and stone railings have been shattered, more statues chipped, and rain, entering freely by a large rent in the roof, has worked invisible damage since my last visit in November. The cathedral has been struck again. The uplifted sword of Joan of Arc in the bronze equestrian statue before the cathedral has been cut in half.

If this were all, we should have after the war at least a worthy memorial to leave to posterity. It is said that it would now cost a million sterling to restore the finest Gothic fane in France. I hope nothing of the kind will be attempted, nothing more, that is, than the construction of a new roof, new windows, doors, and furnishings, and the necessary strengthening of the structure.

For as it stands, gashed and discolored, the vast shell has a strange magnificence and a piteous loveliness like that of some of the broken splendors that remain to us from the ancient world. Let Rheims speak to the future generations as the ruins of the Acropolis and the Forum have spoken to our fathers and us.

But the city itself raises a different and a more difficult problem. It is now no exaggeration to say that as a whole it is destroyed beyond hope. Till a fortnight ago large parts of it were not beyond the possibility of repair. Remember that Rheims was not a small town like Ypres or Arras, but a wealthy and dignified community of 120,000 souls, occupying a space equal to one-fifth of that of Paris.

There is now from end to end probably not a single house whose walls are not more or less broken. The northern and eastern quarters were already in ruins. Now the centre of the city is gutted. Of the public buildings the central squares built in the time or after the Counts of Champagne, the cloth warehouses and workshops, the private residences, bazaars and shops, nothing stands but rows of smoking walls, half buried in fallen rafters and masonry.

The Abomination of Desolation

An Episode in France

_Dr. Norman Maclean, an eminent Scottish scholar, whose articles from the front have appeared in The Scotsman of Edinburgh, penned this touching picture of the war-devastated Somme region a few days before the Germans again swept over it in March, 1918:_

They stood side by side on a heap of rubbish inside the door of the ruined church in the midst of the ruined town--a man and woman garbed in humble, rusty black. The survivors of the erstwhile population were being brought back as shelters were prepared and work provided for them; these had obviously just returned, and had come straight to the church. When they fled before the flood of death, the church stood scatheless, built immovably upon the rock of the centuries. It was a shrine of beauty and a haunt of peace. But as they now stood on the mound of fallen masonwork inside the west door, what they saw was this--the roof lying in an undulating ridge piled on the floor, the sacred pictures torn and tattered; the pillars shattered; the altar buried under a great mass of débris, and a figure of the Christ, uninjured, looking out through the broken arches on the dead town, and on the land beyond, where the white crosses gleam o'er the multitudinous dead.

The man stood motionless, with a face like a mask. But in a moment the woman shook as if stricken by an ague. She turned and stumbled toward the doorway, where there is no door, the tears coursing down her cheeks and a sob in her throat. The man turned and followed her. He took her hand in his, and they walked away with bowed heads in silence. It is strange how the human heart is moved. It was the tremulous face of that black-robed woman, and the lifting of her hands as if to hide the abomination of desolation from her sight, and the stumbling flight from a scene intolerable, that made me feel the horror spread before me. For I saw it with her eyes.

What she saw was infinitely more than what I could see. She had experienced in her own soul that this was holy ground. In happy days of childhood heaven seemed to lie here; she had come hither to be received, in white, into the holy fellowship; hither to be married; hither to dedicate her children at the sacred font. And when the burden of life was heavier than could be borne, how often had she come hither; and as she fell on her knees at the elevation of the Host, the very God seemed to fold her in the Eternal Embrace, and her troubles fled as morning mists before the sun.

And when the war came, and the men went forth, and with them her sons, how often did she come softly to this sanctuary and dip her hand in the holy water at the door and cross herself, and bow toward the altar, and kneel and pray that they might be saved. In and out all day they came then, men and women, and they prayed for their own, and for France, and their prayers were as the moaning of the winds. * * * And now this! Nothing is left. Home and town and children and sanctuary are all overwhelmed in the one flood. And the Christ from the broken pillar gazes upon a perishing world. It is with her as with those of old, who fell under the heel of the oppressor and who cried: "Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation; our holy and our beautiful house where our fathers praised Thee is burned with fire, and all our pleasant things are laid waste."