ashes and has had 110 persons shot. I
bring this fact to the knowledge of the people of Liege in order that
they may know what fate to expect should they adopt a similar attitude.

GENERAL VON BULOW.
Liege, Aug. 22, 1914."

CRUEL EXTREME OF PUNISHMENT.

And yet this order showed only a cruel extreme of punishment where some
punishment was to be expected. It was left for the retreating Germans of
1917 to destroy, without provocation and without purpose, motived by
revenge and obsessed by the Nietschean doctrine of "spare not."

Before Bapaume was evacuated it was deliberately converted into a mass
of muck. There is no Bapaume now. It is perfectly understandable that
the retreating soldiers should destroy their trenches and put up the
question, "Tommy, how do you like your new trenches?" But why smear
filth over the photograph of three little girls, a family treasure? All
around Bapaume the villages were looted and the night the deliverers
entered the destroyers made the sky lurid with the fires of towns and
hamlets. Some 300 in the evacuated region were burned.

At Nesle, Roye and Ham there was not time enough to destroy everything.
The house of a doctor at Nesle, a specially attractive home, was not
blown down for strategic purposes, but some soldiers did find time to
drive axes through the mahogany panels of the beds and smash the clocks
and mirrors. They were angry at being compelled to leave the house.

Villages like Cressy, near Nesle, where a shell never fell in the course
of the war, have been completely destroyed.

PERONNE A HOPELESS RUIN.

There is not a habitable house left in Peronne. The sixteenth century
church of St. Jean is but a relic. W. Beach Thomas wrote after the
retreat that nothing was left that was valuable enough to be worth
collection by a penny tinker or a rag-and-bone merchant. Foul what you
cannot have, was the motto.

The famous ruins of the Feudal Castle of Coucy, one of the finest relics
of architecture of its period, was wantonly blown up by the Germans on
retreat. It was built in the thirteenth century by Enguerrand III and
passed to the French crown in 1498, and was one of the great historic
landmarks of Northern France.

Coucy was one of the noblest relics of the Middle Ages, respected by the
most barbarous wars of the past, whose donjon (greatest in all Europe)
dates almost from Charlemagne, harmless, time-wrecked, illustrious
Coucy!

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