The Scranton tribune. [volume] (Scranton, Pa.) 1891-1910, 1897-10-23
General Weyler Compared to the Duke of
Alya, a Predecessor i'm the Spanish Army.

torn from their mothers breasts to have
their brains dashed out with the butt of a
musket or split I'm twain with a machete; /;
were the mothers not coldly murdered or
cast into Shiny Spanish dungeons. The
Duke Of Alva was the prince of fiends of
his time and generation. Has he not a
worthy successor now in Cuba?
wEYLERs CRIMES.
Valeriano Wcyler is a worthy exponent
of the teachings of his once predecessor.
A brief outline of his career will tell his
story of fieldish butchery. He was born
in 1899 Of Prussian father and Spanish
mother. From 1869 to 1872 he was a cap
tain I'm the Suanish army in Cuba. Then
his name first became hated and despsed,
and then he made enemies who even to-
day seek his life for wrongs done to wives
and sweethearts. The most cruel general
of ancient Rome was a mild infant in
comparison with this modern butcher
His orders in Cuba have gone beyond hu-
man endurance; no one may leave his
own home under pain of torture and
death, and an expression of sympathy for
prisoners or the Cuban cause or an ad-
verse expression regarding him or his
army means death without trial. No
statistics can be secured in order to COM
pare the actual number of innocent peo-
pie who have died at his hand or by his
order with the 1900 murdered by the
Duke of Alva. but during the two years
of the war in Cuba, it is not unlikely that
he has given the earlier butcher a close
race for bloody precedent,
WBYLER'S BARBARITY.
But whether or not the sum total out
rival Alva, it is certain that for fiendsh
barbarism this Prusso-Spaniard stands
without a peer. Fancy, if you can tt
mother and father tied to trees and COM
PEELED to witness the hacking to pieces
of their two sons, while afterward their
two daughters were stripped, forced to
dance before their Captors, and finally, by
Weyier's orders, be ravished until they
died, while the inhuman wretch who gave
the orders sat by and looked on. Weyler
is charged with a list of barbaric crimes
that defy comparison. He takes few
prisoners, and ii is his delight to come
upon a camp of wounded or sick Cubans
and put them to the machete They dig
no graves, and in few days the buzzard-
picked bones are bleaching in the sun. He
wages his war upon women and children,
and rarely chooses a conflict where one
can be avoided. Alva lived in an age
when darkness covered the world, when
barbarism in war was expected, but Wcy-
Ter is of the nineteenth century, an age
of enlightenment. He Is small in stature
and equally small in intellect. His primal
characteristic is ambition, and no factor
Ol mummy, Justice OF mercy plays any
part when the satisfaction of this pur-
pose is at stake.
SHOOTS PRISONERS IN THE BACK.
Weyier does not tie men together and
drown them No, not Weyler He chooses
for them worse fate; he chains them to-
gether by the neck, faces them against a
blank wall and has them shot in the back.
1t is known that upon one occasion he
went into n cell and with an immense
club beat into insensibility some twenty
prisoners who, half starved, were unable
to defend themselves. All of them died
from the treatment. Loathsome dung
cons, in which the tide enters, and where
the atmosphere soon sickens and kills,
are one of his favorite modes of torture,
but he is not averse to adding a diet of
salt fish and no water, until the poor vic
tim dies a raving maniac.
A comparison of these two-Alva and
Weyler-leaves one with the impression
that Spain has produced the two worst
! examples of inhuman thirst for blood.