29 SEPTEMBER 1944, Page 13

Sin,—The following is an extract from a letter just received

from an English staff officer on the Italian front :—" The toll of German atrocities is mounting. Recently we came on a house where II Italian women and five children had been shut in a bathroom and the Germans had thrown hand grenades in through the window ; only five survived. I saw the room myself. In the same village they herded all the in- habitants of a house in a dark passage and machine-gunned them ; x5 were killed. And, finally, two prisoners (an officer and a sergeant) they took last week were found by us later unburied ; one had had his head put in boiling water and the other his eyes gouged out and a stick put through his gullet—all before they were dead. It's quite past