Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 129, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 June 1917 — American Consul Tells of German Barbarity. [ARTICLE]

American Consul Tells of German Barbarity.

“The submarine war grows more barbarous every day. It has now reached the plane of deliberate murder of every ship sunk and so will continue to the end. It is not the fault of the Germans that every torpedo does not produce a Lusitania massacre.” That is the Kaiser’s unrestricted submarine warfare in the words of a man who probably knows more about the human side of the sea tragedy than any other—certainly more than any other American. He is Wesley Frost, consul at Queensland, the port on the southwest coast of Ireland, where all the Atlantic ocean lanes of Britain come together. Frost is in Washington for a rest. For over two years he has been, in attendance at the funerals of merchant ships struck down by the underwater terror. It has been his task to collect evidence as to sixty-five ship sinkings in which Americans were imperiled or slaughtered. Frost has seen the cemeteries of the Irish hillsides; he has seen men mad with hunger and heard the shrieks of mothers for their murdered babes; he tells of the sinking of the torpedoed without warning, arid which sank in three minutes with 30 women and children on board; he tells of men going mad from being left in boats without water and leaping into the' sea to end their sufferings; he tells how the German pirates gutted a lifeboat, threw provisions into the sea, filled fresh water kegs with salt water and turned five Americans loose; he tells how survivors were robbed of their personal belongings, and photos of mothers and sweethearts thrown into the sea; he tells how German pirates torpedoed one boat, took survivors to the submarine deck, left them standing there, then went down below, closed the hatch and then the pirate boat submerged, leaving victims floundering in the sea. Such is the German idea of warfare, and a true criterion of the mode of warfare employed by the Kaiser and his men.