Chapter VIII: Part I: No. 3 (8)

One by one the Seeadler sent to the bottom the British ships Gladis Royle, Lady Island, British Yeoman, Pinmore, Perse, Horngarth; the French vessels Dupleix, Antonin, La Rochefoucauld, Charles Gounod, and the Italian ship Buenos Aires. On March 7, 1917, it encountered the French bark Cambronne two-thirds of the way between Rio de Janeiro and the African coast and forced it to take on board 277 men from the crews of the eleven vessels previously captured. The Cambronne was compelled to carry these to Rio de Janeiro, where it landed them on March 20, thus first revealing the work of the Seeadler to the world. On March 22 the German Government announced the safe completion of the second voyage of the Möwe. (See CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE for May, 1917, p. 298.)

Having thus ended its operations in the Atlantic, the Seeadler rounded Cape Horn with the intention of scouring the Pacific. In June it sank two American schooners in that ocean, the A. B. Johnson and R. C. Slade, adding another, the Manila, on July 8, and making prisoners of all the crews. Captain Smith of the Slade afterward told the story of his experiences. His ship had been attacked on June 17, and he had at first tried to escape by outsailing the raider; but after the ninth shell dropped near his ship he surrendered. He continued:

They took all our men aboard the raider except the cook. Next
morning I went back on board with all my men and packed up. We left
the ship with our belongings June 18. We were put on board the
raider again. Shortly after I saw from the raider that they cut
holes in the masts and placed dynamite bombs in each mast, and put
fire to both ends of the ship and left her. I saw the masts go over
the side and the ship was burning from end to end, and the raider
steamed away.

After six months of hard life at sea the raider was in need of repairs and the crew longed for a rest on solid land. Casting about for an island sufficiently isolated for his purpose, the Captain, Count von Luckner, decided upon the French atoll of Mopeha, 265 miles west of Tahiti; he believed the little island to be uninhabited. The Seeadler dropped anchor near its jagged coral reefs July 31, 1917. On Aug. 1 Captain von Luckner took possession of the islet and raised the German flag over what he called the Kaiser's last colony. But the next day, during a picnic which he had organized "to entertain his crew and prisoners," leaving only a few men on board the Seeadler, a heavy swell dropped the ship across an uncharted blade of the reef, breaking the vessel's back. The Germans were prisoners themselves on their own conquered islet!

Von Luckner had been incorrect in believing the island entirely uninhabited. Three Tahitians lived there to make copra (dried cocoanut) and to raise pigs and chickens for the firm of Grand, Miller & Co. of Papeete; this firm was shortly to send a vessel to take away its employes, a fact which the Germans learned with mixed emotions.

They brought ashore everything they could from their wrecked ship, including planks and beams, of which they constructed barracks; also provisions, machine guns, and wireless apparatus. The heavy guns were put out of commission--likewise the ship's motor. The wireless plant, a very powerful one, was set up between two cocoanut trees. It was equipped with sending and receiving apparatus, and without difficulty its operator could hear Pago-Pago, Tahiti, and Honolulu.

On Aug. 23 Count von Luckner and five men set out in an armed motor sloop for the Cook Islands, which they reached in seven days. There they succeeded in deceiving the local authorities, but a few days later they and their boat were captured in the Fiji Islands by the local constabulary and handed over to the British authorities. Thus ended the Captain's hope of seizing an American ship and returning to Mopeha for his crew.

On Sept. 5 the French schooner Lutece from Papeete arrived at Mopeha to get the three Tahitians and their crops. First Lieutenant Kling took a motor boat and a machine gun and captured the schooner, which had a large cargo of flour, salmon, and beef, with a supply of fresh water. Kling and the rest of the Germans, after dismantling the wireless, left the island that night, abandoning forty-eight prisoners, including the Americans, the crew of the Lutece, and four natives. Before going they destroyed what they could not take with them, cut down many trees to get the cocoanuts more easily, and left to the prisoners very scant provisions, and bad at that. The few cocoanuts that remained were largely destroyed by the great number of rats on the island. There was plenty of fish and turtles.

After the flight of the Germans the French flag was hoisted on the island and the twentieth-century Robinson Crusoes organized themselves under Captain Southard of the Manila and M. Fain, one of the owners of the Lutece. The camp was rebuilt, the supplies rationed out, the catching of fish and turtles arranged, and the question of going in search of help discussed. On Sept. 8 Pedro Miller, one of the owners of the Lutece, set sail in an open boat with Captains Southard and Porutu, a mate, Captain Williams, and three sailors, hoping to reach the Island of Maupiti, eighty-five miles to the east; but after struggling eight days against head winds and a high sea he returned to Mopeha with his exhausted companions. Two days later, Sept. 19, Captain Smith of the Slade, with two mates and a sailor, left the island in a leaky whaleboat dubbed the Deliverer of Mopeha and shaped their course toward the west; in ten days they covered 1,080 miles and landed at Tutuila, one of the Samoan Islands, where the American authorities informed Tahiti by wireless of the serious plight of the men marooned on Mopeha. The British Governor at Apia--Robert Louis Stevenson's last home--also offered to send a relief ship; but the Governor of the French Establishments of Oceania, declining this offer with thanks, dispatched the French schooner Tiare-Taporo from Papeete on Oct. 4.

Two days later the relief expedition sighted Mopeha by means of a column of smoke that rose from the island, for the Robinson Crusoes had organized a permanent signal system to attract the attention of passing vessels. The arrival of the rescuers was greeted with frantic acclamations. By evening the last boatload of refugees was aboard the Tiare-Taporo, and on the morning of Oct. 10 the schooner reached Papeete, where the prisoners at last were free.

The fate of the Lutece with the main body of the Seeadler's crew was indicated, though not fully explained, by a cable dispatch from Valparaiso, Chile, March 5, 1918, stating that the Chilean schooner Falcon had arrived there from the Easter Islands with fifty-eight sailors formerly belonging to the crew of the Seeadler. The sailors were interned by the Chilean Government. Count Felix von Luckner, commander of the Seeadler, who, with five of his men, had been captured by the local constabulary of the Fiji Islands, was interned by the British in a camp near Auckland, New Zealand. In December he and other interned Germans escaped to sea in an open boat and traveled nearly 500 miles, suffering from lack of food and water, but were recaptured after a two weeks' chase.

Treatment of British Prisoners

Shocking Brutalities in German War Prisons Revealed in an Official Report

A report issued by an official British Investigating Committee, known as the Justice Younger Committee, appointed to investigate the treatment of British soldiers by their German captors, made public in April, 1918, presents a shocking record of barbarities. The commission reported as follows:

There is now no doubt in the minds of the committee that as early,
at the latest, as the month of August, 1916, the German Command were
systematically employing their British as well as other prisoners in
forced labor close behind the western firing line, thereby
deliberately exposing them to the fire of the guns of their own and
allied armies. This fact has never been acknowledged by the German
Government. On the contrary, it has always been studiously
concealed. But that the Germans are chargeable, even from that early
date, with inflicting the physical cruelty and the mental torture
inherent in such a practice can no longer be doubted.

Characteristically the excuse put forward was that this treatment,
not apparently suggested to be otherwise defensible, was forced upon
the German Command as a reprisal for what was asserted to be the
fact, namely, that German prisoners in British hands had at some
time or other been kept less than thirty kilometers (how much less
does not appear) behind the British firing line in France. This
statement was quite unfounded.

Furthermore, at the end of April, 1917, an agreement was definitely
concluded between the British and German Governments that prisoners
of war should not on either side be employed within thirty
kilometers of the firing line. Nevertheless, the German Command
continued without intermission so to employ their British prisoners,
under the inhuman conditions stated in the report. And that
certainly until the end of 1917--it may be even until now--although
it has never even been suggested by the German authorities, so far
as the committee are aware, that the thirty kilometers limit agreed
upon has not been scrupulously observed by the British Command in
the letter as well as in the spirit.

"Prisoners of Respite"

The German excuse is embodied in different official documents, some
of which enter into detailed descriptions of the reprisals alleged
to be in contemplation because of it. These descriptions are in
substantial accord with treatment which the committee, from the
information in their possession, now know to have been in regular
operation for months before either the threat or the so-called
excuse for it, and to have continued in regular operation after the
solemn promise of April that it should cease. These documents
definitely commit the German Command to at least a threatened
course of conduct for which the committee would have been slow to
fix them with conscious responsibility. Incidentally they
corroborate in advance the accuracy, in its incidents, of the
information, appalling as it is, which has independently reached
the committee from so many sides.

As a typical example, the committee set forth a transcript in
German-English of one of these pronouncements, of which extensive
use was made. It is a notice, entitled, "Conditions of Respite to
German Prisoners." As here given, it was handed to a British
noncommissioned officer to read out, and it was read out to his
fellow-prisoners at Lille on April 15, 1917:

Upon the German request to withdraw the German prisoners of war to
a distance of not less than thirty kilometers from the front line,
the British Government has not replied; therefore it has been
decided that all prisoners of war who are captured in future will
be kept as prisoners of respite. Very short of food, bad lighting,
bad lodgings, no beds, and hard work beside the German guns, under
heavy shellfire. No pay, no soap for washing or shaving, no towels
or boots, &c. The English prisoners of respite are all to write to
their relations or persons of influence in England how badly they
are treated, and that no alteration in the ill-treatment will occur
until the English Government has consented to the German request;
it is therefore in the interest of all English prisoners of respite
to do their best to enable the German Government to remove all
English prisoners of respite to camps in Germany, where they will
be properly treated, with good food, good clothing, and you will
succeed by writing as mentioned above, and then surely the English
Government will consent to Germany's request, for the sake of their
own countrymen. You will be supplied with postcard, note paper, and
envelope, and all this correspondence in which you will explain
your hardships will be sent as express mail to England.

Starved to Death

It seems that the prisoners, from as early as August, 1916, were
kept in large numbers at certain places in the west--Cambrai and
Lille are frequently referred to in the evidence--but in smaller
numbers they were placed all along the line. Their normal work was
making roads, repairing railways, constructing light railways,
digging trenches, erecting wire entanglements, making gun-pits,
loading ammunition, filling munition wagons, carrying trench
mortars, and doing general fatigue work, which under the pain of
death the noncommissioned officers were compelled to supervise.

This work was not only forbidden by the laws of war, it was also
excessively hard. In many cases it lasted from eight to nine hours a
day, with long walks to and fro, sometimes of ten kilometers in each
direction, and for long periods was carried on within range of the
shellfire of the allied armies. One witness was for nine months kept
at work within the range of British guns; another for many months;
others for shorter periods. Many were killed by these guns; more
were wounded; deaths from starvation and overwork were constant. One
instance of the allied shellfire may be given. In May, 1917, a
British or French shell burst among a number of British and French
prisoners working behind the lines in Belgium. Seven were killed;
four were wounded.

But there is much more to tell. The men were half starved. Two
instances are given in the evidence of men who weighed 180 pounds
when captured. One was sent back from the firing line too weak to
walk, weighing only 112 pounds; the other escaped to the British
lines weighing no more. Another man lost twenty-eight pounds in six
weeks. Parcels did not reach these prisoners. In consequence they
were famished. Such was their hunger, indeed, that we hear of them
picking up for food potato peelings that had been trampled under
foot. One instance is given of an Australian private who, starving,
had fallen out to pick up a piece of bread left on the roadside by
Belgian women for the prisoners. He was shot and killed by the guard
for so doing.

Some Merciful Guards

It was considered, so it would seem, to be no less than a stroke of
luck for prisoners to chance upon guards who were more merciful. For
instance, one of them speaking of food at Cambrai says:

If it had not been for the French civilians giving us food as we
went along the roads to and from work we should most certainly have
starved. If the sentries saw us make a movement out of the ranks to
get food they would immediately make a jab at us with their rifles,
but conditions here were not so bad as at Moretz, where if a man
stepped out of the ranks he was immediately shot. I heard about
this from men who had themselves been working at Moretz, and had
with their own eyes seen comrades of theirs shot for moving from
the ranks.

At Ervillers in February, 1917, a prisoner's allowance for the day
consisted of a quarter of a loaf of German black bread, (about a
quarter of a pound,) with coffee in the morning; then soup at
midday, and at 4:30 coffee again, without sugar or milk. On this a
man had to carry on heavy work for over nine hours. The ration of
the German soldier at the same time and place consisted of a whole
loaf of bread per day, good, thick soup, with beans and meat in it,
coffee, jam, and sugar; two cigars and three cigarettes. The food
conditions at Marquion a little later are thus described:

We used to beg the sentries to allow us to pick stinging nettles
and dandelions to eat, we were so hungry; in fact, we were always
hungry, and I should say we were semi-starved all the time. While
we were here our Sergeants put in for more rations, but the answer
they got was that we were prisoners of war now "and had no rights
of any kind; that the Germans could work us right up behind their
front lines if they liked, and put us on half the rations we were
then getting."

Flogged with Dog Whip

The ration was coffee and a slice of bread at 4:45 A. M., soup of
barley and horseflesh at 2 P. M., eight pounds of barley and ten
pounds of meat between 240 men. And they were compelled to work hard
for eight or nine hours a day on this diet. The frequent cruelty of
the guards generally is a matter constantly referred to:

The German Sergeant in charge at Ervillers (says one prisoner) was
very harsh. Twice I saw him (this prisoner was there for a month
only) using a dog whip, and heard of him doing so on another
occasion. He used it mostly on men who were slow in getting out to
work owing to weakness.

The description by a body of these men on their arrival at a camp in
Germany, after being withdrawn from the front, may be taken as
another example of this:

We were forced to work; we were given hardly any food, and when we
fell down from sheer exhaustion we were kicked until we got up
again, and it was not until we absolutely could not get about that
we were sent back.

To add to their miseries, the accommodation provided for these
prisoners was in many cases pathetically inadequate. The witnesses
recur to this again and again. One sleeping place, for instance, for
a large party was a barn with no roof. The rain poured in upon the
men. They had to sleep in their wet clothes and work in the same
clothes. They had no change of any kind. And some of these
prisoners, if they survived so long, were kept behind these enemy
lines for over a year. Their quarters at Cambrai are thus described
by two of the men:

our uniforms, without either greatcoats or blankets. There was no
fire, and it was very cold. We lay on loose straw, which was full
of vermin, and we consequently became verminous. We could only
wash in a bucket of cold water, without either soap or towels.

The Germans did not supply us with any clothing, and as we had to
work in all weathers, conditions were very hard. Our clothes used
to get drenched through, but still we had to go back to barracks
and sleep in them. It was terribly cold also, especially without
our fur coats. We asked for clothing, but never got any.

No Parcels or Letters

But, added to all these hardships, it was the total absence of
parcels and the fact that letters or communications from their
friends rarely reached them that placed these prisoners, for misery,
in a class apart. Instances are on record where the very existence
of some of them was undisclosed by their captors for many months. In
March, 1917, for example, a body of these prisoners who had been
captured as long before as August, 1916, and had been kept at work
by the Germans behind their lines ever since, were returned to a
parent camp in Germany weak and emaciated. On arrival there they
found a number of their own names in the lists of missing men that
had been sent from our War Office through Switzerland and posted in
the camp. * * *

It seems almost incredible, but the committee do not doubt it to be
the fact, that as late as November, 1917, there were at
Limburg-am-Lahn undelivered between 18,000 and 20,000 parcels for
British prisoners on the German western front. In July, 1917, the
German delegates at The Hague plainly recognized that no distinction
in respect of the receipt of parcels could be properly made between
prisoners of war in occupied territories and others. The agreement
then concluded contains provisions on that subject. Having regard to
the condition of things at Limburg as late as November, 1917, the
committee can only regret that the effect of that agreement was
certainly at that date not so manifest as it ought to have been. The
matter, they add, is of tragic importance to the prisoners
concerned. It made and makes just the difference between starvation
and existence to the unfortunate sufferers.

Extracts from Evidence

The committee extract from the great mass of evidence now in their
possession statements as to the impression produced upon those who
actually saw our men upon their escape to the British lines or after
their transfer to camps in Germany. These statements, they believe,
must convince every impartial mind that it is impossible in terms of
exaggeration to describe the sufferings these prisoners had
undergone.

In April, 1917, three of them escaped over "No Man's Land." They
were received by a British General Staff officer, a Major in the 1st
Anzac Corps. This is what he says of them, under date April 18,
1917:

Three men escaped from behind the German lines to us the other day.
They had been prisoners three months, and were literally nearly dead
with ill-treatment and starvation. One of them could hardly walk,
and was just a skeleton. He had gone down from 182 pounds to less
than 112 pounds in three months. I fetched him back from the line,
and it almost made me cry. All that awful January and February out
all day in the wet and cold; no overcoat, and at night no blanket,
in a shelter where the clothes froze stiff on him; no change of
underclothing in three months, and he was one mass of vermin, no
chance of washing. The bodies of all of them were covered with
sores. "Beaten and starved," one of them said, "sooner than go
through it again I'd just put my head under the first railway."

The following is the substance of statements by two witnesses from a
German camp:

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."

There is that in man which enables him to meet every blow of fate with unblanched face--save one. When the blow is aimed at his soul, then he shrivels. It was in her soul that this woman was smitten, as she saw the house of her God thus. And that is why there in the land of death the churches and cathedrals are all in ruins. To make the altars of Arras gaze on the clouds and the stars, and make the winds wail through the colonnades of Rheims, was deemed the surest and swiftest way of spreading terror and affright. So the devotées of Odin declared war upon God. For a little while the tribal deity and the belligerent dynast reign supreme. The homeless and bereft, the great multitude who are as those standing on the rubble-heap, are verily left with nothing but their eyes to weep with.

It is amazing how soon one gets assimilated to the most horrifying environment. In a few days one can walk through a town which has been turned into heaps without even a shock of wonder, just as at home one reads the war news and the list of the dead without any realization. In these days we need to be stung broad awake now and then. A city in ruins becomes deadly monotonous--until one is wakened.

One day, when the sun broke forth heralding the Spring, the promise of green on a clump of tangled rose bushes tempted me to turn into the garden of a shattered villa. It was as thousands of others: the hearthstones looked upward to the clouds, and the household goods lay piled tier on tier of rotting lumber as floor fell on floor. In the centre of the green a shell hole took my eye, and I picked my way toward it. Out of the earth at the bottom of the hole there obtruded the bones of a man's arm. In haste, the dead had been thrown into the shell hole and lightly covered. And the rains had washed so much of the earth away. And that bone brought the realization that I stood in the midst of one vast cemetery.

Everywhere and all around under the feet are the nameless dead--men, women, and little children. These last are the nightmare of this horror. Formerly nations recovered from war swiftly; the cradles filled up the gaps. But here the children are dead. To the eye of faith the Star of the East shines still with splendor over every spot where a babe lies. But that Star has been extinguished in this region of doom. The altar is buried, the hearthstone is in the rain, and amid the welter of rubbish you can see the children's cots twisted and rusting and woeful. A woman breaking into sobs inside a ruined church door; a body in a shell hole in a garden, a child's cot rusting on a rubbish heap--these open the eyes and make them see.

These things did not come by the arbitrament of war. It wasn't shrapnel and high explosives that wrought the desolation. From the battlements of the old citadel one can see the dead town lie spread, and the houses hit by shells are few and far between. The houses destroyed wantonly by the enemy ere they retreated are easily recognized, for the walls fell outward by the internal explosions. Ninety-five per cent. have fallen outward, and the wall of the church is likewise. This ancient sanctuary was wantonly destroyed by the retreating enemy. What amazes one is the appalling stupidity of such a crime. If the Germans destroyed the town, that was their right, the might of the sword, and their act could perhaps be justified. But to destroy the church is to destroy what even Attila spared, and so outrage the conscience and instinct of the world. There is never an excuse to seek when an outrage is perpetrated by the enemy. A hospital ship is sunk--but, of course, it is carrying munitions! A church is turned into a ruin, but its towers are used as observation posts! Poor little towers in a land of airplanes and captive balloons! If the churches had been spared, as they were spared in the world's darkest ages, humanity would know that the German soul was still alive. But now the world knows that it is up against an enemy that threatens body and soul alike--an enemy that not only kills the body, but destroys the soul! What an amazing stupidity!--but it is through such stupidity that God lays up judgment against the day of wrath.

Lloyd George and General Maurice

A Speech in Which the Premier Routed His Enemies and Revealed Some Inside Facts

A flurry arose in British Parliamentary circles early in May which for a day or so threatened to wreck the Lloyd George Government, but which resulted in a new triumph for the Premier and a humiliating defeat for those who had intrigued against him. It was precipitated by Major Gen. Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, who had been Director of Military Operations until April, 1918, when he was succeeded by Brig. Gen. Radcliffe. His removal had been due to a public utterance in which he had criticised General Foch for not coming sooner to the assistance of the British after the beginning of the German offensive.

On May 7 General Maurice published a letter in which he definitely asserted that the Premier had made a misleading statement to the House of Commons April 9, when he asserted that the British Army in France on Jan. 1, 1918, was considerably stronger than on Jan. 1, 1917; that he misstated the facts regarding the number of white divisions in Egypt and Palestine; also that Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had made a misstatement in denying that the extension of the British front in France had been ordered by the Versailles War Council.

A resolution was introduced by former Premier Asquith for the appointment of a committee to investigate the charges. The Lloyd George Government accepted the challenge and announced that they would regard the passage of the resolution as a vote of censure and would resign if it was carried. The debate on the resolution occurred May 9 and resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Government, the vote to uphold the Lloyd George Ministry being 293 to 106; the Irish members were not present.

In his address the Premier took up the charges in detail. Regarding the figures of the British strength he quoted from a report from General Maurice's own department, initialed by his deputy, dated April 27, 1918, which concluded with these words:

From the statement included, it will be seen that the combatant
strength of the British Army was greater on Jan. 1, 1918, than on
Jan. 1, 1917.

He also showed that his statements regarding the relative strength of the opposing forces in France and the number of white divisions in Egypt were based on figures furnished by General Maurice's department.

Regarding the extension of the British front in France the Premier made some interesting disclosures showing that the extension was made by agreement of Field Marshal Haig and General Pétain, and not by the Versailles Council. He said:

Before the council had met it had been agreed between Field Marshal
Haig and General Pétain, and the extension was an accomplished fact.
Field Marshal Haig reported to the council that the extension had
taken place. There was not a single yard taken over as a result of
the Versailles conference--not a single yard of extension.

In discussing this phase Lloyd George proceeded as follows:

Extending the British Line

Of course, the Field Marshal was not anxious to extend his line. No
one would be, having regard to the great accumulation of strength
against him, and the War Cabinet were just as reluctant.

There was not a single meeting between the French Generals and
ourselves when we did not state facts against the extension, but the
pressure from the French Government and French Army was enormous,
and what was done was not done in response to pressure from the War
Cabinet. It was done in response to very great pressure which Sir
Douglas Haig could not resist and which we could not resist. We are
not suggesting that our French allies are asking unfairly. That is
certainly not my intention.