Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 235, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1917 — Friend of Kershner Family Writes of Gorman Atrocities. [ARTICLE]

Friend of Kershner Family Writes of Gorman Atrocities.

Herman Ashbaucher, of Bluffton, has written to his mother in that city telling of the atrocities committee by the Germans. Mr. Ashbaucher is now somewhere in France. The Bluffton boy is a friend of the Kerschner family, of south of Rensselaer. The following clipping has been handed us for publication: Somewhere in France, August 28, 1917. My Dear Mother and All:

Nearly a month has elapsed since I wrote you my last letter and in that time I’ve had many experiences, some of* which will be embedded in my memory for some time to come. Today some of the boys received a newspaper from Chicago and the Tribune had the large headline regarding bombing of the American hospitals in France. That night of horror shall never leave my vision or hearing, though our unit was lucky enough to escape any damage. Do you remember, in one of my letters, written around the 31st of July, when I told about the wonderful success of the British forces in Flanders. Then it was that I predicted to you that was only the beginning of a huge struggle and the coming of the end. Well yesterday, the day before, today and tomorrow, and, methniks, for some days to come, you will read of the continued success of the allied armies. If Germany holds out three more months we shall have to finish it in the spring. But I think she is on the verge of collapse. I pray to God she is because the awful

amount of casualties she is having in the field sicken me. The stories of her heaps of dead come to me first hand from, men who have been “up .the line” and “over the top.” These men say that as they cross over No Man’s land and enter the German first, second and third line trenches, what they find is gruesome to the extreme. When will the hand of Him who is supreme stop all this? The lesson of freedom has been a bloody one wherever it has been taught, but Germany is paying for it at far more costly a price than any people before and God grant that no other nation shall ever have to experience the same again. — ~ One of the newest and latest of all the barbarism brought out by the Hun autocracy and Kultur in this era of civilization and which ha’s come under my personal notice is the dropping of candies and sweets with poison on them so they will be picked up by the children who are lucky enough to escape their bombs. Surely dropping bombs on the Geneva Red Cross s bad enough, but when it comes to aking away the lives of young chilIren and other noncombatants in hat manner all exemptions are disqualified and surely a just God will ranish the perpetrators of such war!are.

That the British are respecting the Geneva Red Cross which is really the only remnant of real civilization left on this battle front is shown by the story of a gunner down from the front. He told of a German ambulance drawn by two white horses and though they were working in a district that was very advantageous to the enemy and which could be easily reached by the British guns and that point of enemy defense destroyed, not a British gun was fired in that direction so that the work of giving aid to the poor victims of a dying autocracy was not to be hindered. That is only one of the many stories that show the difference in the aims and the standards of the belligerent armies. On the other hand many of the wounded that come down here are members of the British Royal Army Medical Corps, men who have given their blood to aid the enemy wounded as well as those of their own armies and are paid hhck in this way by a ruthless warfare. This letter has been written with the idea that it may awaken some people back in that dear old state of Indiana and show them the old U. S. A. is really fighting in a war for a just cause against a real enemy of mankind. No sacrifice the people at home can make now or later on shall be as great as those sacrifices which have been made and will he made by their sons at the front. God grant our noble president and those in charge of our nation the power to compel people to make those sacrifices that power may speed the end of this great calamity and bring the dawn of peace. Well, I hear the bugle calling so I must close.