The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-03-29

make the hot water taste like soup.
 l saw men act like savages, eating pieces of brown paper. 1 There were perhaps not more than i thousand women among the retreat | ing horde with us and it is a fact
 worth recording that they were kind 1 ly treated and given whatever com forts were available by soldiers who iwere' otherwise dead to every feeling. have seen such men, gaunt, stagger- ing along; ha1f-naked, with a few pieces of cloth for shoes unable to speak, with barely strength left to stop near a dying horse and cut I stringy steak from it's flank, straight en up for a moment near one of the women's carts and sinnilingIy tender
 their last mouthfuI of food to some of the women.
 'tThe treatment of the women on this dreadful retreat was to me the most wonderful, the most moving, the most heroic part of the whole retreat. These poor women in their fight from
 their homes had in many cases been unable to bring enough clothes to cover them. Often they were with
 out stockings or underskirts, or hats or shaw1s or cIoaks. I have seen
 time and time again some freezing soldier take off his Overcoat and force 1t upon some one of these women, and seen almost ashamed to look upon her shivering body as he made the offer. Then he would search along the road for hours until he was able to strip some dead man of his clothes to re- place that which he had so freely giv- en-"
 What Ha1Ier regarded as his most remarkable experience was the sight of a mad soldier dying from starva- tion- Clothed only in a ragged un-I dershirt he was running barefoot down a snow-covered Albanian road straight as an arrow, believing as he1 ran, he said. He ran on and on down that road, seeing nothing vet wonderfully avoiding stumbling over the bodies of other dead and dying sol diers and the meat-stripped carcasses of the army horses which blocked the way. Suffering intensely as I myself was, I turned and watched this strange figure. At last a half mile down the road he pitched forward and as I passed him later I saw, he was stone dead.''
 ,'.Other than that incident there is one other that will. stick in my mem ory so long as I 1ive,'' said HaIIer. This was the hanging of a Serb mother by the Austrian troops before I was made a prisoner. We wereS marching across a rough country near Lochnitzer when we stopped near a wayside hut at it's spring to get a drink. Colonel HeiIl of our regiment -NAOO from the spring a shot came from, the hut That shot was fred by a woman. She stood att the door, an old shotgun in one hand, baby in the other.
 2 ttone of the captains ordered her hung. There was nothing else to do but execute her. As a rope was placed about her neck and she was led to the nearest tree all she said was this, in a hard, cold voice: My husband is a soldier. I too die for Serbia She made no appeal. She did not cry out We left her body hanging there in the wind The baby was picked up and sent to the nearest prison camp, to be cared for.'' id
 Through the efforts of Robert Hay erick, representing the United States among the Austrian prisoners, EaIIer was rescued from starvation at Du- razzo and later Ambassador Page in Rome interested himself in the case.
 T am going back home the best Amer ican citizen you ever saw declared Hal1er. ~I wish I had words to ex- press my feeling for the kind of peo- pie that are grown in the United States.''