M. Maeterlinck, addressing a great meeting in Paris last Sunday,
sternly rebuked the neutrals for their comparative indifference to the monstrous cruelties perpetrated by the Germans in Belgium. They had done something, he admitted, for the refugees and the starving, but " what is all they have done when weighed in the scale of what ought to be done if we are to absolve them deep down in our conscience and before history which will judge them ? " He resented the friendliness with which the neutrals still receive the criminals. At the same meeting M. Vandervelde showed how the slave raids were a direct violation of a German promise, another " scrap of paper." " A few days ago, at Gembloux, the Germans took a man, the father of seven children, whose wife had died the day before. The local authorities vainly implored for delay ; the man was hurried away while the children were weeping round their mother's corpse." In the Mons district, the Belgian Senators and Deputies have definitely refuted Bissing's assertion that the deported men were unemployed. In some communes most of the slaves were actually taken from their work.
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