Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 227, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1919 — INDIANA SOLDIER TELLS OF TERRIBLE BRUTALITIES. [ARTICLE]

INDIANA SOLDIER TELLS OF TERRIBLE BRUTALITIES.

Camp Devens, Ayer, Mass., Sept. 16.—Appearing before a special board of inquiry, which is taking data for the congressional committee at Washington, which is to hear the direct evidence later, Charles A. Mannering, of Veedersburg, Fountain county, Indiana, first class private, this afternoon told his own : story of the abusive and brutal at-: titude of “Hard Boiled” Smith at prison farm No. 2 near Paris, where Smith was in charge. Mannering, who was formerly employed on the C. C. C. & St. L. railroad two years before his enlistment and several years previously on the Wabash railroad as a firerAan and who is now a military prisoner here, completely lost control of himself toward the end of his recital, so intense were his feelings. Speaking of his initial arrival in camp, Mannering stated: “They searched me and took out my mother’s picture, tore it up and threw it into a waste basket. I said: ‘That’s my mother’s picture,’ and they said, ‘you can buy a" bum’s picture for a couple of francs and it will look just as good.’

“I saw them search another machine gunner and take off his revolver. A marine pointed it at the man’s heart and pulled the trigger, saying: ‘lf there are any bullets in it you are going to get the first one.’ Fortunately it was unloaded. “After I was searched, a young marine came up to me and smacked me in the face and said, ‘Get into that room on the double.’ The smash made my nose bleed and .1 pulled down my hands to wipe it away, whereupon he cracked me with his club. I rushed into the room and stopped inside the door. One of the prisoners grabbed me and pulled me further into the room. ‘Never stop on the deadline if you want to leave the room alive,’ he said. I saw men standing at attention for three hours at a time and every time their muscles gave out under the strain and they sagged they were struck with a club. I saw them drag two sergeants out of the room and make them do torturing exercises for forty minutes. When they dropped they were beaten with clubs. One was clubbed so strenously that they could not bring him to. They dragged him away and we never saw him again. The boys said he died. We had to sit on the concrete floor all day without resting against any support. If a man leaned back against the wall and the guards saw him it meant either the hospital or the grave. “They had two colored men there and when a guard wanted to see how strong he felt he called one of them into the corridor and knocked him down. The job of the two colored men was to scrub soldiers brought in intoxicated. They did it with a stiff scrubbing brush and made the flesh raw and bleeding. “I asked permission to explain my situation, and told Smith t>l was h wounded man there by mistake. Smith ignored my explanation, and, with the other men, I was deprived ■of leggins, given one blanket and quartered for the night in the racing stable of a Frenchman. The bed was the cobblestone floor of a stall and no food was given the men that night. The weather was cold and raining. The next morning the men who had newly arrived at the

prison camp were lined up. “ ‘Hard Boiled’ Smith strutted before us, up and down the lines, looking us over, then he started to yell at us. ‘l’m Hard Boiled Smith, do you get me; -I’m boss of this place. Don’t forget that. You birds are going to soldier as you never soldiered before and you can’t skip out. There; are only two ways to leave this place. One is to go out tfiatongwoodenboxfeetfifgt, and the other way Is straight out to. the front lines to be blown to hell by the boche. Yesterday a man thought he knew a different way to get out of here, but he was all wrong. See for yourself,’ and he pointed -to a still form lying under an old army “Finally I got to see the surgeon. He was all right, the only human I found in that camp. He saw I was wounded, heard my story, and got me out of there as soon as he could. I’ve forgotten his name, but he used me right. I was returned to Paris, sent to the flat-foot camp at St Aignan where a medical board placed me in class B-2 and I was invalided to the states, where I got my honorable discharge. ‘HardBoiled’ Smith himself is a little man, short and wiry, and as tough as any man I ever saw. All of the men he had with him at the camp to run things were of his type. was not a guard there that I could find who had been up to the front, or who knew what a soldier’s life is. They were deserters, slackers, men thrown out of different regiments because they were no good. These were the men ‘Hard Boiled’ had doing his dirty work. It was

not an army prison camp, but ‘Hard Boiled’ Smith’s camp. I sure was glad to get out of that place.”