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tematically committed by a nation which prides itself on having all the progress of science at its service, could be committed with impunity. For these crimes there should be the triple punishment of international law, of penal law, and of the victory of the civilized world.

First, the judgment of international law: There is an article of the Convention of Oct. 18, 1907, which I have not yet cited. I even believe that this article was inserted at the demand of Germany. I refer to Article 3 of Convention IV., which says: "The belligerent who shall violate the provisions of said rule shall be held liable to indemnity if there is cause, and shall be responsible for all acts committed by persons belonging to its armed forces." Consequently, they are responsible materially, financially-they must pay!

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Not

Do you know how they regret their crimes? One of our colleagues, M. Ordinaire, just now read this sentence from the Vossische Zeitung: "Our troops are full of joy, the joy of having inflicted harm on some one else." The whole German mentality is in that remark. only do they not repent the crimes they have committed, but they still boast of them. They must be reached by the penal law. The first punishment that is necessary, the one without which the others will be impossible, is victory.

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The martyrdom of our fellow-countrymen has stirred in all our souls a new resolve of pitiless justice. We will go to the end, to the furthest point to which our strength will carry us, over the ruins

of German imperialism and militarism, to establish the triumph of peace, of liberty, and of the inalienable rights of the human conscience.

The Senate Resolution

At the end of M. Cheron's address the Senate by a unanimous vote passed the following resolution:

THE SENATE:

Denouncing before the civilized world the criminal acts committed by the Germans in the regions of France occupied by them, crimes against private property, against public edifices, against the honor, the liberty, the life of individuals;

Asserting that these acts of unheardof violence were perpetrated without the excuse of any military necessity and in systematic contempt of the international convention of Oct. 18, 1907, ratified by the representatives of the German Empire;

Holds up to universal execration the authors of these crimes, whose permanent repression is demanded by justice;

Salutes with respect those who have been their victims, and to whom the nation solemnly promises, here placing the vow on record, that they shall have full reparation from the enemy;

Affirms more than ever the will of France, sustained by her admirable soldiers and in accord with the allied nations to pursue the struggle which has been imposed on her until German imperialism and militarism are definitely crushed, responsible as they are for all the miseries, all the ruins, and all the griefs heaped upon the world!

Pitiful Tales From Ruined Homes

Philip Gibbs, the war correspondent, sent to The London Telegraph of April 1, 1917, this moving account of the sufferings of French civilians in the region liberated by the German retreat on the Somme:

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and are now the rubbish heaps which lie about that great stretch of country laid waste by the enemy in the wake of his retreat where there is only silence and black ruin; because, also, I have just been among these people, seeing their tears, hearing their pitiful tales, touched by hands which plucked my sleeve so that I should listen to another story of outrage and misery. All they told me, and all I have seen, builds up into a great tragedy. These young girls, who wept before me,

shaken by the terror of their remembrance, these brave old men, who cried like children, these old women, who did not weep, but spoke with strange, smiling eyes as to life's great ironies, revealed to me in a fuller way the enormous agony of life behind the German lines now shifted back a little, so that these people have escaped.

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It is an agony which includes the German soldiers, themselves enslaved, wretched, disillusioned men, under the great doom which has killed so many of their brothers, ordered to do the things many of them loathe to do, brutal by order even when they have gentle instincts, doing kind things by stealth, afraid of punishment for charity, stricken both by fear and hunger. "Why do you go?" they were asked by one of the women who have been speaking to me. "Because we hope to escape the new British attacks," they answered. "The English gunfire smashed us to death on the Somme. The officers know we cannot stand that horror a second time." They spoke as men horribly afraid. Of their hunger there seems no doubt. They begged food of these civilians, who would have starved to death but for the American relief supplies. They killed cats and dogs to provide themselves with a taste of meat which otherwise they do not taste. This, although the German Kommandantur seized all the cattle and foodstuffs of the French inhabitants, and requisitioned all their hens and took the eggs the hens had laid.

"I was the bailiff of Mme. la Marquise de Caulincourt," said an elderly man, taking off his peaked cap to show me a coronet on the badge. "When the Germans came first to our village they seized all the tools, and all the farm carts, and all the harvesting, and then they forced us all to work for them, the men at 3 sous an hour, the women at 2 sous an hour, and prison for any who refused to work. From the château they sent back the tapestries, the pictures, and anything which pleased this commandant or that, until there was nothing left. Then in the last days they burned the château to the ground, and all the village and all the orchards." "It was the same always," said a woman. "There were

processions of carts covered with linen, and underneath the linen was the furniture stolen from good houses."

"Fourteen days ago," said an old man, who had tears in his eyes as he spoke, "I passed the night in the cemetery of Vraignes. There were 1,015 of us people from neighboring villages, some in the church and some in the cemetery. They searched us there and took all our money. Some of the women were stripped and searched. In the cemetery it was a cold night and dark, but all around the sky was flaming with the fire of our villages -Poeuilly, Bouvincourt, Marteville, Trefeon, Monchy, Bernes, Hancourt, and many more. The people with me wept and cried out loud to see their dear places burning, and all this hell. Terrible explosions came to our ears. There were mines everywhere under the roads. Then Vraignes was set on fire and burned around us, and we were stricken with a great terror. Next day the English came, when the last Uhlans had left. The English!' we shouted, and ran forward to meet them, stumbling, with outstretched hands. Soon shells began to fall in Vraignes. The enemy was firing upon us, and some of the shells fell very close to a barn quite full of women and children. Come away,' said your English soldiers, and we fled further."

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Russian prisoners were brought to work behind the lines, and some French prisoners. They were so badly fed that they were too weak to work. "Poor devils!" said a young Frenchwoman, "it made my heart ache to see them." She watched a French prisoner one day through her window. He was so faint that he staggered and dropped his pick. A German sentry knocked him down with a violent blow on the ear. The young Frenchwoman opened the window, and the blood rushed to her head. "Sale bête!" she cried to the German sentry. He spoke French and understood, and came under the window. "Sale bête'? For those words you shall go to prison, Madame." She repeated the words and called him a monster, and at last the man spoke in a shamed way and said: 66 'Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre. C'est cruelle, la guerre!" This man had

kinder comrades. Stealthily pitying the Russian prisoners, they gave them a little brandy and cigarettes, and some who were caught did two hours' extra drill each day for a fortnight.

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"My three sisters were taken away when the Germans left," said a young girl. She spoke her sisters' names, Yvonne, Juliette, and Madeleine, and said they were 18 and 22 and 27, and then, turning away from me, wept very bitterly. They are my daughters," said a middle-aged woman. "When they were taken away I went a little mad. My pretty girls! And all our neighbors' daughters have gone, up from 16 years of age, and all the men folk up to.50. They have gone to slavery, and for the girls it is a great peril. How can they escape e? How can one write of these things? For the women it was always a test. Many of them had surprising courage, but some were weak and some were bad. The bad women forced on the others in a way so vile that it seems incredible. They entered into relations with German officers, and flaunted viciously under their protection, and robbed women of quality of their dresses and linen, and demanded jewelry from houses looted by their officers, and laughed as they drove in German cars past Frenchwomen of gentle birth who were forced to work in the fields. They are stories such as Guy de Maupassant might have written, but worse than he imagined.

There was no distinction of class or sex in the forced labor of the harvest fields, and delicate women of good families were compelled to labor on the soil with girls strong and used to this toil. There were

Brand Whitlock On

"One of the Foulest

The State Department made public on April 21, 1917, a report from Brand Whitlock, American Minister to Belgium, written in January, when he was still holding his difficult position at Brussels under German occupation. Of all his reports since the beginning of the war

many who died of weakness and pneu-. monia and underfeeding. "Are you not afraid of being called barbarians forever?" asked a woman of a German officer, who had not been brutal but, like others, had tried to soften the hardships of the people. "Madame," he said, very gravely, we act under the orders of people greater than ourselves, and we are bound to obey, because otherwise we should be shot. But we hate the cruelty of war, and we hate those who have made it. One day we will make them pay for the vile things we have had to do."

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"Sir," said a Sister of Charity, "these people whom you see here were brave, but tortured in spirit and in body. Beyond the German lines they have lived in continual fear and servitude. The tales which they have told us must make the good God weep at the wickedness of his creatures. There will be a special place in hell, perhaps, for the Emperor William and his gang of bandits." She spoke the words as a pious conviction, this little pale woman with bright and kindly eyes, in her nun's dress.

Roughly and hurriedly I have put these things down. It is only later that one may strike the balance of them all, and draw the right lesson of all this tragedy which is the nature of war. An old lady whom I met today drew perhaps the great lesson in its strict truth. “I am 77 years old," she said. "I saw the war of 1870, and was a prisoner of the Germans. Now I have seen this war, a thousand times worse than that other one. Two such wars in a lifetime are too much. But one such war in all the history of the world is still too much. Can we not finish with it forever?"

Belgian Deportations
Deeds in History"

this is the only one thus far given to the public. It reads as follows:

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tion that collaborates with the Commission for Relief in Belgium-proposed an arrangement by which the Belgian Government should pay to its own employes left in Belgium, and other unemployed men besides, the wages they had been accustomed to receive.

The Belgians wished to do this for humanitarian and patriotic purposes; they wished to provide the unemployed with the means of livelihood, and, at the same time, to prevent their working for the Germans.

The policy was adopted and has been continued in practice, and on the rolls of the Comité National have been borne the names of hundreds of thousands-some 700,000, I believe-of idle men receiving this dole, distributed through the com

munes.

The presence of these unemployed, however, was a constant temptation to German cupidity. Many times they sought to obtain the lists of the chômeurs, [unemployed,] but were always foiled by the claim that under the guarantees covering the relief work the records of the Comité National and its various sub-organizations were immune. Rather than risk any interruptions of the ravitaillement, for which, while loath to own any obligation to America, the Germans have always been grateful, since it has had the effect of keeping the population calm, the authorities never pressed the point other than with the Burgomasters of the communes. Finally, however, the military party, always brutal and with an astounding ignorance of public opinion and of moral sentiment, determined to put these idle men to work.

In August von Hindenburg was appointed to the supreme command. He is said to have criticised von Bissing's policy as too mild; there was a quarrel; von Bissing went to Berlin to protest, threatened to resign, but did not. He returned, and a German official here said that Belgium would now be subjected to a more terrible régime, would learn what war was. The prophecy has been vindicated.

The deportations began in October in the étape, at Ghent and at Bruges. The policy spread; the rich industrial districts of Hainaut, the mines and steel

works about Charleroi were next attacked; now they are seizing men in Brabant, even in Brussels, despite some indications, and even predictions of the civil authorities, that the policy was about to be abandoned.

During the last fortnight men have been impressed here in Brussels, but their seizures here are made evidently with much greater care than in the provinces, with more regard for the appearances. There was no public announcement of the intention to deport, but suddenly, about ten days ago, certain men in towns whose names are on the list of chômeurs received summonses notifying them to report at one of the railway stations on a given day and penalties were fixed for failure to respond to the summons, and there was printed on the card an offer of employment by the German Government, either in Germany or Belgium.

On the first day, out of about 1,500 men ordered to present themselves at the Gare du Midi, about 750 responded. These were examined by German physicians and 300 were taken. There was no disorder, a large force of mounted Uhlans keeping back the crowds and barring access to the station to all but those who had been summoned to appear. The Commission for Relief in Belgium had secured permission to give to each deported man a loaf of bread, and some of the communes provided warm clothing for those who had none, and in addition a small financial allowance.

As by one of the ironies of life the Winter has been more excessively cold than Belgium has ever known it, and while many of those who presented themselves were adequately protected against the cold, many of them were without overcoats. The men shivering from cold and fear, the parting from weeping wives and children, the barriers of brutal Uhlans, all this made the scene a pitiable and distressing one.

It was understood that the seizures would continue here in Brussels, but on Thursday last, a bitter cold day, those that had been convoked were sent home without examination. It is supposed that the severe weather has moved the Germans to postpone the deportations.

The rage, the terror, and despair excited by this measure all over Belgium were beyond anything we had witnessed since the day the Germans poured into Brussels. The delegates of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, returning to Brussels, told the most distressing stories of the scenes of cruelty and sorrow attending the seizures. And daily, hourly, almost, since that time, appalling stories have been related by Belgians coming to the legation. It is impossible for us to verify them, first because it is necessary for us to exercise all possible tact in dealing with the subject at all, and, secondly, because there is no means of communication between the Occupations Gebiet and the Etappen Gebiet.

Transportation everywhere in Belgium is difficult, the vicinal railways scarcely operating any more because of the lack of oil, while all the horses have been taken. The people who are forced to go from one village to another must do so on foot or in vans drawn by the few miserable horses that are left. The wagons of the breweries, the one institution that the Germans have scrupulously respected, are hauled by oxen.

The well-known tendency of sensational reports to exaggerate themselves, especially in time of war, and in a situation like that existing here, with no newspapers to serve as a daily clearing house for all the rumors that are as avidly believed

as they are eagerly repeated, should, of course, be considered, but even if a modicum of all that is told is true, there still remains enough to stamp this deed as one of the foulest that history records.

I am constantly in receipt of reports from all over Belgium that tend to bear out the stories one constantly hears of brutality and cruelty. A number of men sent back to Mons are said to be in a dying condition, many of them tubercular. At Malines and at Antwerp returned men have died, their friends asserting that they have been victims of neglect and cruelty, of cold, of exposure, of hun

ger.

I have had requests from the Burgomasters of ten communes from La Louvière, asking that permission be obtained

Thus

to send to the deported men in Germany packages of food similar to those that are being sent to prisoners of war. far the German authorities have refused to permit this except in special instances, and returning Belgians claim that even when such packages are received they are used by the camp authorities only as another means of coercing them to sign the agreements to work.

It is said that in spite of the liberal salary promised those who would sign voluntarily no money has as yet been received in Belgium from workmen in Germany.

One interesting result of the deportations remains to be noted, a result that once more places in relief the German capacity for blundering almost as great as the German capacity for cruelty.

They have dealt a mortal blow to any prospect they may ever have had of being tolerated by the population of Flanders; in tearing away from nearly every humble home in the land a husband and a father or a son and brother, they have lighted a fire of hatred that will never go out; they have brought home to every heart in the land, in a way that will impress its horror indelibly on the memory of three generations, a realization of what German methods mean, not, as with the early atrocities in the heat of passion and the first lust of war, but by one of those deeds that make one despair of the future of the human race, a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed.

Illegal Property Seizures

Minister Havenith of Belgium on April 20 delivered to the State Department at Washington a memorandum warning the world that any dealings in Belgian property or credits seized by German agents would be contested in the courts after the var. The memorandum says:

An order of the German Government, dated Aug. 29, 1916, disregarding the principles of international law, or

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