received special instructions to question these victims. They
took the evidence of over 300 witnesses in 28 different localities. To
do justice to their case one ought to quote the whole report--children
brutally torn away from their mothers, poor wretches crowded for days
together in carriages so tightly packed that they had to stand up, cases
of madness occurring among these half-stifled crowds, howling with
hunger. But we must confine our quotations to a few items of "Kultur."
"While the men of Combres set out for Germany, the women and children
were shut up in the village church. They were kept there for a month,
and passed their nights seated in the pews. Dysentery and croup raged
among them. The women were allowed to carry excrement only just outside
the church into the churchyard."--"At least four of the prisoners were
massacred because they could not keep up with, the column, being
completely exhausted."--"Fortin, aged 65, and infirm, could not go any
further. They tied a rope to him, and two horsemen held the ends so that
he had to keep the pace of the horses. As he kept falling down at every
moment, they made him get up by poking him with their lances. The poor
wretch, covered with blood, prayed them to kill him."

"189 inhabitants of Sinceny, who were sent to Erfurt, arrived there
after a journey of 84 hours, during which each of them got nothing but a
single morsel of bread weighing less than four ounces. Another convoy
spent four days on the railway journey and were only fed once, and were
beaten with sticks and fists and with knife handles." The same
brutalities were experienced in the German cities through which they
passed, and very few of the civilian prisoners escaped being buffeted by
the infuriated crowds or being spat upon.

So much for the journey. Now for what happened to them after their
arrival! "The declarations made to us show clearly that the bulk of the
prisoners almost collapsed from hunger. After food had been distributed,
when anything was left, you saw some of them rush to the neighbourhood
of the kitchens; hustled and beaten by the sentries, these unfortunates
risked blows and abuse to try and pick up some additional morsels of
the sickening food. You saw men, dying of hunger, picking up herring
heads, and the grounds of the morning's decoction."

At Parchim, where 2,000 French civilians from 12 to 77 years of age were
interned, two starving prisoners who asked for the scraps left over