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Show HORRORS-OF DEPORTATIONS IN BELGIUM There is endless confusion over tho atrocities in Belgium by reason of the conflicting accounts which come from J different sources of Information. On C Monday the Standard printed a lottor I from E. E. Harriman of Tho Vigilantes j- quoting a friend, who had been in j France, as an eye witness of the hor- rlblo mistreatment of little girls and jj boys. At one place 200 little girls, be- j tween 9 and 14 years, were violated j and mutilated. But the American as- j? sistant to Herbert C. Hoover, who was 'i stationed at Brussels for ovor two years, writing of his experiences, says: The Germans entered Belgium j in August and September, 1914; I wo began to come In November. I Hence we saw none of the "atro- citios" of tho invasion we saw & only results' of them. Among these results, as seen, by us, were, I hasten to say, no women without breasts or children without hands. But there were women without I husbands and sons and daughters, 5 and children without mothers and jjj fathers. But there were ceme- jp teries with scores and hundreds of new graves not of soldiers; and little toddling children came f up eagerly, saying: "My father j and mother are dead." And we fj hear myriad stories of the re- a licts of Dlvant, Vise, Andenness, g anB all the rest. $ The events which most impressed f the Americans on the relief work in fa Belgium and northern France were the M deportations., estimated at 100,000 13 rri n -, ... c uun, UUU11.U uciginu men. uu miS phase of German brutality the following follow-ing is given: The world knows this hazily, I say. Much has been written about this deporting; about its causes, . the conditions that incited German Ger-man authority to do it it was the ' highest military authority that, decreed it, not von Bissing's Belgian Bel-gian government the manner of ' its doing, its results. But the world needs the whole story. Unfortunately Un-fortunately It cannot yet be written. writ-ten. Among other things lacking is the knowledge of just how many of the hundred thousand Belgian slaves have died and are to die in Germany. Some have been sent back hastily, bo that they would not die in Germany; they die on tho returning trains, or soon after they get back. Or, what is worse, some do not die, but continue to live, helpless physical wrecks. The deportations were not hazy to us. They were the most vivid, shocking, convincing, single happening hap-pening In all our enforced observation obser-vation and experience of German disregard of human suffering and human rights in Belgium. We did ' did not see the things that hap-' : pened to the deported men in Germany. Ger-many. But we could not help knowing some of them. When the wrecks began to be brought back the starved and beaten men who would not sign the statements that they had voluntarily gone to Germany to work, and the starved and beaten ones who would nol work at all; and the ones who could could not work ovon when driven by fear of punishment they tried to, on the acorn soup and sawdust bread of the torture camps when these poor wrecks came back, they brought their experiences ex-periences with them, and revealed them by a few words and the sim- i . pie exhibition of their scarred and emaciated bodies. The deportations occurred hear the end of the period of our stay in Belgium. They were the final and the fully sufficient exhibit, prepared by the great German machine, to convince absolutely any one of us who might still have been clinging to his original desperately des-perately maintained attitude of neutrality that it was high time that we were somewhere else on the other side of the trench-lino, trench-lino, by preference. There could He no neutrality In the face of tho deportations; you are for that kind of thing, or you are against it. We are against it; America is against it; most of tho civilized nations are against it. That is the hope of the world. nr |