The Mena weekly star., 1918-05-02
GERMANS REVEL IN
 PLANNED MURDER
Brand Whitlock Tells of Carefully Or. ganized Slaughter as Part of Scheme for Subjection of
 Belgium.

New Describing heretofore unrevealed German atrocities, Brand Whitlock, United States minister to Belgium, indicates the Prussian hor- TOTS were conducted with Prussian efficiency as part of the plan of cam
 ign. Whitlock was in Belgium when kulture overwhelmed the land.
 Writing in Everybody's Magazine for May, he tells how carefully or ganized barbarities followed in the wake of the German drive. being especially cruel after each German de- feat
 Even Babies Were Shot Down.
 Picturing what occurred when the French resisted German attempt to bridge the Mouse August 23, 1914, Whitlock says:
 People were held there. evidently as sort of screen, while the Germans began to construct temporary bridge over the river Tie Germans sent citizen of Dinant. one of the prison CTS, in a boat across the river to in- form the French that unless they ceased firing the civilians would be shot. But a few stray bullets still sped across the river. The prisoners were massed together-nearly ninety of them, old men and young, girls and boys, little children and babies in their mothers arms. A platoon was called up, the colonel in command gave the word to fire and the gray soldiers in cold blood shot down those ninety persons as they stood huddled there together, Among them were twelve children under the age of 6 years, six of them little babies whose mothers, as they stood up to face their pitless murderers, held them in their arms"
 Germans Ran Amuck in Andenne.
 The fate of the town of Andenne, before the war place of 7,S00 peo- pie, is cited by Whitlock as an ex- ample of what happened when the Germans were thrown back in an at- tempt to cross the Mouse on a tenn porary bridge:
 "All night the killing and pillaging went on," he says. "The crowd was ordered to walk toward the Place des Tilleuls. Those who did not walk fast enough were shot down. A Flemish clockmaker came out of his dwelling supporting his aged father-in-law He was ordered to hold up his hands, but he could not do so without letting the old man fall, so a soldier struck him in the neck with an ax.
 Arrived at the Place des Tilleuls, the women and children were separ- ated from the men, Haphazard the soldiers picked out thirty or forty men and shot them down in cold blood. And all the while, day and night, in the flaming streets the pill lage and murder went on. The man who described it all to me had vivid memory of tall, red-headed soldier, who was particularly conspicuous by the ferocity with which he wielded the ax and mutilated his victims, baby among them, in the arms of it's moth err"
 Revenge for Every Defeat.
 Speaking of the destruction of Bortmeerbeek, near Malines, Whit lock says that every time the Ger man army was thrown back upon it, they burned forty houses.
 At Dinant, Whitlock declares:
 "Women and children were forced to stand by and witness the murder of husbands and fathers. One woman, Mime. Alin, who had given birth to a child three days before, was borne forth on mattress by German sol diers, who said they would compel her to look on while they shot her hus- band, but her cries and applications finally moved the soldiers to spare the husbands life.
 "In the little graveyard beside the church at Tamines there are hundreds of new made graves" writes Whit lock. "The crosses stand in rows. They are all neat, of painted wood, alike except for the names and ages from 13 to 84. But they all bore the same sinister date, August 22, 1914.
 Huns Killed the Wounded.
 About six hundred men were massed in St. Martins Square by the river bank and the women folk, their wives, mothers, daughters, were as- sembled to witness the scene"
 Quoting an eyewitness, Whitlock described how the Germans lined up the victims, then tumbled 150 of them backward into the river, pushing back with bayonets those who tried to swim ashore. After this, machine guns were turned on the remaining lines and all but twenty swept away by the bullets. After dark the Ger man soldiers, with pocket flashlights, went among the bodies killing the wounded.
 
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