Watertown republican. [volume] (Watertown, Wis.) 1860-1906, 1876-08-30

One OF the Victims of Turkish Barbari.
ty Tells Hor Story

n I N~N~~N~~~t 49,
the 10th, says: ,..s
Every tongue is charged and every
heart IS full of Observation-Disclosures It'd
lngs OF turkish atrocities committed on
the lnotfenslve peasant folk of frontier
villages In districts where there can be
no pretense for severity for military
reasons. The men are gone from the
village OF the Greuze; the victims are
miserable women and napless children.
Burning, wrecking, butchery and viola
ton constitute to all appearance the en-
joined functions of the merciless
Bashl-Bazouks and ruffianly Redifs.
whom the Turkish commanders. keen
ing in fixed positions their regular
troops, let loose with letters of maroue
to practice the utmost ingenuity of dew
iltry. From the frontier district be-
tween Nisch and Alexinatz come nov
similar tidlngs to those telegraphed the
other day as having been sent by
Alempics from the western frontier
about Bellina. No man who is not OBJ
stinately determined to be incredulous
can question the truth of these state
ments. Officers and soldiers who come
down from the front authenticate them
with tales of burnt villages which they
have seen, the mangled bodies
Of children lying in the cutters among
the charred debris; headle5s trunks of
Serbian soldiers in places where there
has been fighting; men in the up
country hospitals, with noses slit by
knives as they lay helpless from their
wounds. In the course of an after
Moons ride, [ found my way into vii
lage on the hill-slope, about the door ct
one of the houses in which there was
group OF women and children, with
here and there an old man-all the
able bodied men are away to the war.
On the settle under the projecting
caves, there sat a woman, draggled,
miserable and forlorn, with boy about
twelve years old, standing by her side;
and around them the people had form
ed semi-circle, and were looking on
with a strange concerned patience of
silence. The woman, too, was silent;
she sat there in an apathetic reverie of
dependency, with her eyes on the
ground, and one arm round the boy.
One Of the women whispered some
thing to my companion, Serbian Off
Ger, whose face flushed, and whose
mouth set sternly, at the low recital.
Dismounting, he approached the
woman, and speaking to her, startled
her from her abstraction. AS he
spoke, at first she was asleep seeming
ly and Indifferent; her aspect was
that Of one with no interest
in anything. But at length she kindled,
and with flashing volubility poured
forth the story of her wrongs, which
my companion hurriedly and by scraps
translated to me. Delicacy, after all, is
relative term. An English woman,
if she could bring herself at all to
tell the shameful story of outrage and
indignity which this miserable creature
had to recount of herself, would have
spoken of the degradation and its de-
tails with trembling and downcast eye.
Not surely the less did this Sclave wom-
an culver with the agony of her invol-
untary degradation because she told us
of there before the people-with a
shrill voice and flashing volubility of
utterance. The personal outrages to
which she had been subjected cannot
be written down in their horrible cir
cumstantiality; but you may realize
how the recital thrilled her audience, if
you recall the shuddering spasm that
vibrated through England when the
earliest tidings, happily in one item of
atrocity not true, reached us of the
opening scenes Of the Indian mutiny.
Her cottage had been burnt before her
eyes; of three children she had seen
one, the baby, tossed about from sol
der to soldier, and then flung into the
flames; of the second she knew moth
ing; the third, the lad who was now
with .,er, had made his escape timer
ously, and joined her, from out the cov-
er OF a wood after she was allowed to
drag herself away from the scene of
deviltry. Her relatives resided, she
said, In one of the small hamlets
of the Golubinge upland, and she had
tramped thus far on her way to shell
ter herself among them. Her husband
had left for the army since the earliest
days of the war, and she knew nothing
of his whereabouts. Their cottage had
been on the upland near Granada
Pass. 1t is not far from this section of
the extreme southeastern corner of
Serbia, where is, or rather was, the vii
lage of Lojun, of which Col. Prolich
yesterday reported from Alexinatz that
the church, school and other buildings
had been burned. Poljan, another vii
lage in the same angle, is also reported
by the same authority to have been
desolated in a similar manner. Now,
apart altogether from the mere atroci-
ty of these outrages, they are curious
Illustrations of the exceptional charac-
ter of the war. The villages thus DESC
lated are inside the Serbian frontier.
But the Serbian troops are in positions
considerably outside the Serbian from
tier in this same direction; so you have
the Turks in detached parties, not only
between the Serbian columns and their
frontier but actually, after fashion,
reprisals in the shape of mutual inva-
sion. 1t is just as if, when the Germans
were holding the country around Metz,
bands Of French soldiery had been
desolating the German villages of Dutt-
weller and Neunkuchen, and the dis
trict generally inside the valley of the
Saar.
THE Calif0rpia farm org have fakon