It is here that the pen falters, and the heart turns sick with horror
and loathing. Thus far the newspapers of the United States have shrunk
from printing the awful details that have been available on this
subject.
For fifty years we have been reading of the wars of nations,--white,
black, red, brown and yellow,--but never in modern times have we seen
such ghastly, such loathsome, such shocking and sickening brutalities
of lust as German officers and soldiers inflicted, wholesale, upon the
women of Belgium and northern France. At present we will say little of
Poland, for the subject is too vast.
I shall not give instances, even though there are hundreds at hand,
well authenticated, and undoubtedly true. But let all Americans
remember this: Never within the last four hundreds years or more
have any women ever been so brutally abused, so extensively raped by
violence, often accompanied by murder in Jack the Ripper fashion, or so
disgustingly maltreated before the eyes of fathers, mothers, sisters,
brothers and groups of men as were the wretched women of Belgium and
northern France.
The rage of the German brutes whose great conquest of France was balked
seemed to be visited with particular fury and cruelty upon the women of
the captured territory between fourteen and forty years of age. I have
before me one instance so awful and so revolting that the woman upon
whom it was inflicted immediately went mad. The details are published
only in French, in order that only a few English-speaking persons may
read them.
No wonder that when the armies of General Joffre and General Foch were
chasing the German ravishers back to the banks of the Marne, that the
French women of the recaptured towns and villages dragged themselves to
their windows, leaned out, and begged the French soldiers to "=Take no
prisoners! Kill them,--all!="
The total number of women who have been cruelly abused by German
officers and private soldiers never will be known; but it must run
up into hundreds of thousands. Only the devil himself knows how many
miserables have been "given to the soldiers," just as was the Polish
maid of an American lady, Madame Turczynowics, now in New York, who
tells about it in her book, "When the Prussians Came to Poland" (page
138). This is the passage:
... we pushed our way into the room where Manya was, ... =what had
been= Manya.... An officer came in to ask our business with the girl.
"She is my maid--stolen! This is her father. I have come to take her
home."
"I am very sorry, but you are not allowed to take her. =She belongs to
the soldiers.="
"Don't you see, Herr Offizier, the girl is =dying=?"
"Ill she is, and shall have the best of care. We have a doctor to
attend to just such cases."--And =I had to leave her=!