cash. No military advantage is sufficient motive for such wanton
ravishment. It is military fanaticism.

Ambassador Sharp, after a 100-mile trip through the evacuated territory,
declared that never before in the history of the world had there been
such a thorough destruction by either a vanquished or victorious army.

One thing alone was left, after the red-brick villages had been turned
into heaps and the murdered fruit trees into black fagots, on the hill
outside of St. Quentin. This was the log hut and shooting box of the
Kaiser's son, Eitel Friederick. Its white-barked beech was unburnt, its
glass windows unbroken, its inside adornments unlooted, the tables and
chairs of its terrace beer garden remained. All around the works of man
and God were destroyed. The contrast made this destroyer's lodge a sort
of boast of his destruction.

The shocking ruin to human life in the evacuated region is of even
greater moment. The half-starved civilians of Bapaume were forced to
make trenches there and later for the defense of Cambrai also. All men
and boys strong enough to work were taken along with the retreating
forces. Near Peronne some hundreds of old men, women and children were
found locked in a barn. One woman pathetically asked of an English
officer, "Are you many?" And he was able to answer, "We are two millions
now," and see her anxiety turned to relief and joy. Children who had
been slowly starving for a year wandered about the ruins of their homes,
but soon found reasons for smiling at the soldiers who had rescued them.

NEITHER MEAT NOR MILK.

These children had had no meat for months and no milk for a year and had
almost forgotten the taste of butter. They probably never received a
quarter of the rations Americans sent. Girls were compelled to attend
the market gardens, and then the Germans took all the produce. The
region was desolated and left inhabited by women and children moribund
with misery and starvation.

At Noyon, where the Germans had concentrated 10,000 Belgian refugees,
they promised to leave the American Relief Committee with sufficient
supplies to feed them. But the last patrols completely sacked the
American relief storehouses of all eatables and then dynamited the
building. And it was from this place that fifty young women, from 18 to
25 years of age, were taken by the officers. Their distracted mothers
were told that they were to be used as "officers' servants."

At Ham, when a mother of