AND SUCH A CASE HAS NEVER
BEEN OBSERVED in the town, although the place is full of wounded.'

"A second report which the same journal exposed dates from October,
1914. Recently Dean A., who is the Superior in a military hospital in
the Franciscan Nunnery at S., came to us and reported that a wounded
soldier had told him that he had heard[124] that in the monastery Bl. by
V., in Holland, there were twenty-two wounded German soldiers whose eyes
had been gouged out by Belgians. The Dean begged us to write to the
Mother Superior and ask for confirmation of the story. We did write, and
the lady answered that there was no hospital at all in the cloister
Bl."[125]

[Footnote 124: The words "hear" and "heard" occur very frequently in
these legends.--Author.]

[Footnote 125: The Rev. Duhr's book, pp. 11-12.]

The same lie travelled to Bonn, Sigmaringen, Potsdam, Bremen, and was
successively nailed down by the _Volkszeitung_. Inquiries were made in
all directions wherever a case of gouged-out eyes was reported, the
result being everywhere the same--a fairy-tale.

Yet when the German Imperial Chancellor received a party of American
journalists (representatives of the United Press and the Associated
Press) on September 2nd, 1914, he communicated this statement: "The
English will inform your countrymen that German troops have burnt down
Belgian villages and towns, but they will conceal the fact that Belgian
girls have gouged out the eyes of our helpless soldiers lying on the
battlefields."

"Berlin papers informed the public that 'a large number of Belgian
civilians were prisoners in Muenster. They are the same bestial creatures
who shot from their houses on our unsuspecting troops, and who, before
the arrival of our invading armies in Belgium, had perpetrated all sorts
of cruelties on helpless German citizens. Indeed, when they were
searched on their arrival at the prisoners' camp fingers with rings on
them, which they had hacked off their victims, were found in their
pockets. Justice will soon strike down these Belgians, among whom a very
large number of priests are to be found. Twenty to thirty have already
been condemned to death by a court-martial.'

"The 'Pax' Society of Priests immediately wrote to the commander of the
prisoners' camp, and received this reply: 'The ridiculous assertion of a
Berlin paper that fingers had been found in the pockets of Belgian
civilians in this camp is false. Neither has any priest or lay