Juliette F——, the more guilty of the two, was sentenced to pay a fine of eighty marks, and Georgette S—— to pay one of forty marks, because "acting this way to prisoners of war exercises a particularly disturbing effect on them."
Two little girls of Kolmar, named Grass and Broly, were arrested for "having answered, by waving their hands, kisses French prisoners threw to them."
A boy fifteen years old, pupil in the upper school at Mulhouse, named Jean Ingold, who, in the classroom tore down the portrait of the Emperor and painted French flags on the wall with the inscription "Vive la France," was condemned to a month in prison. The War Council saw an aggravating circumstance in the fact that Jean's father "occupies a very lucrative position as a German functionary."
On the thirtieth of March, 1916, two sisters from Guebwiller—Sister Edwina, née Bach, Mother Superior, and Sister Emertine, née Eckert, were charged with anti-German manifestations for having treated as lies the figures regarding French and Russian prisoners sent out in the German communiqués, for having protested against the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral, for having treated as false the German victories that had been announced, and for having said on the subject of the German invasion of Belgium, "How can they attack a country that asked for nothing?"
The result was that they got six months' imprisonment.
The case of Mme. Berthe Judlin, in the faith Sister Valentine, is more tragic.
The Mulhouse newspapers have published the account of the proceedings in the case of this Sister before the War Council. It appears that she has been the victim of monstrous calumnies, and that her fate can well be compared to that of Miss Edith Cavell.
She was accused of having, from the ninth to the fourteenth of August when she was assigned to the convent of the Redemptorists at Riedishiem, favored the French wounded at the expense of the German wounded. These accusations, which specified in particular, that she had taken various objects away from one wounded man (a charge the prosecution withdrew) and that she hid the cartridges of the French wounded in the attic, were contested by Sister Valentine. After the testimony of the witnesses, nine for the prosecution and fourteen for the defendant, the government commissioner asked that she be punished with a sentence of fifteen years at hard labor and ten years of deprivation of civil rights. Her lawyer asked for her acquittal. The War Council on the fourteenth of December, 1915, after an hour and a quarter's deliberation, decided that "Sister Valentine has done harm to the German Army" and has hidden the cartridges. It condemned Sister Valentine to "five years of hard labor and five years' deprivation of civil rights."
The War on the French Language
The Germans never cease recalling and von Hertling has just repeated the fact that eighty-seven per cent of the Alsatians speak German. It is strange, then, that the German reign of terror has manifested itself in one particular against the use of French, even in the region where French is the language universally spoken.