Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 January 1919 — DEVILISH TO LAST [ARTICLE]

DEVILISH TO LAST

German Atrocities Continue to the End. Retreating Huns Show Ingenuity In Devising, Infernal Machines. Wijh the British-American Armies. —German deviltry seemed to know no bounds in the last days of fighting on the British front, after the Hindenburg line had been shattered. They attached grenades to the bodies of dead Huns left behind in the German retreat, so that when the bodies were lifted the grenades exploded, killing or bounding the bearers. o j- Austra n an stretcher bearers were killed by these grenades in attempting to remove some German dead from the field from in front of an American machine-gun position. Thereafter, no Australian would put hand on a dead German. In some cases the bodies were dragged to their ‘burial places by means of a long rope, which allowed the stretcher bearers to keep out of range of any exploding hand gffchad.es. The Americans, on the other hand, hit upon a plan of making the German prisoners bury their own dead. In one Instance, a Boche prisoner was sumhiarily shot because he refused to remove the body of one of his dead companions. An examination of the body later led to the discovery that it was mined. The German was aware of this/fact and refused to touch it. In one small town evacuated by the Germans, many of the beds were found to be mined. An American offi-

cer, tired and worn by hard fighting, sought rest on a lounge in a room previously occupied by a-German officer. The lounge blew up and he was instantly killed. Another officer picked up a pair of field glasses, left by the Germans, and was adjusting the focus when the glasses exploded in his hands and blew away part of his face. The Huns had become adept in the nefarious business of making infernal machines, mines and time fuses, and tKere was scarcely an area where the electrical and engineering experts of the allies did not find some new form of their fiendish ingenuity.