Now I must begin a chapter of sorrows. I wanted to witness the Austro-Hungarian excesses a second time before speaking of them, so that I could give an exact and genuine account of actual facts. Courage failed me to see all, but what I have seen can be summed up in one phrase. In the environs of Shabatz the vanquished put the finishing touch to their acts of fearful savagery by butchering their Servian prisoners, whose corpses were found heaped up in the town.
Yesterday and the day before I ran across country through Valievo toward Drina. Further north, barely forty miles from Valievo, at Seablatcha, the poor refugees who had fled from their houses before the onslaught of the Austrians showed me eight young people, tied one to another, who were all pierced by bayonets.
Five miles from there, at Bella Tserka, fugitives of the village with indescribable despair were burying the mutilated, bodies of fourteen little girls. Six peasants were found hanging in an orchard.
At Lychnitsa, on the Drina, about a hundred old men, inoffensive civilians, were massacred before the eyes of their wives and children. All the women and children were led over on the other side of the bank of the Drina in order to compel the Servians to stop their fire.
It is not war that Austria-Hungary tried to make on Servia. That great nation wanted to exterminate the Servian people. She thought she would succeed before Servia had time to defend herself.
Austrian prisoners affirm that they received orders to hang all those striving against their country, to burn all the enemy's villages, and put all their inhabitants to death.
The Servian Quartermaster General is drawing up an official list of these Austro-Hungarian deeds.
The Attack on Tsing-tau
By Jefferson Jones of The Minneapolis Journal and The Japan Advertiser.
JAPANESE HEADQUARTERS, Shantung, Nov. 2.—I have seen war from a grand stand seat. I never before heard of the possibility of witnessing a modern battle—the attack of warships, the fire of infantry and artillery, the manoeuvring of airships over the enemy's lines, the rolling up from the rear of reinforcements and supplies—all at one sweep of the eye; yet, after watching for three days the siege of Tsing-tau from a position on Prinz Heinrich Berg, 1,000 feet above the sea level and but three miles from the beleaguered city, I am sure that there is actually such a thing as a theatre of war.