[Sidenote: Treatment of girl mill operatives who refuse to work.]
Not a few of the mill owners were ordered to weave cloth for the invaders, and on their refusal were sent to Germany and held to ransom. Many of the mill operatives, quite young girls, were directed to sew sandbags for the German trenches. They, too, refused, but the Germans had their own ways of dealing with what they regarded as juvenile obstinacy. They dragged the girls to a disused cinema hall, and kept them there without food or water until their will was broken.
Barbarity reached its climax in the so-called "deportations." They were just slave raids, brutal and undisguised.
[Sidenote: The deportations or slave raids.]
The procedure was this: The town was divided into districts. At 3 o'clock in the morning a cordon of troops would be drawn round a district--the Prussian Guard and especially, I believe, the Sixty-ninth Regiment, played a great part in this diabolical crime--and officers and noncommissioned officers would knock at every door until the household was roused. A handbill, about octavo size, was handed in, and the officer passed on to the next house. The handbill contained printed orders that every member of the household must rise and dress immediately, pack up a couple of blankets, a change of linen, a pair of stout boots, a spoon and fork, and a few other small articles, and be ready for the second visit in half an hour. When the officer returned, the family were marshaled before him, and he picked out those whom he wanted with a curt "You will come," "And you," "And you." Without even time for leave-taking, the selected victims were paraded in the street and marched to a mill on the outskirts of the town. There they were imprisoned for three days, without any means of communication with friends or relatives, all herded together indiscriminately and given but the barest modicum of food. Then, like so many cattle, they were sent away to an unknown fate.
Months afterward some of them came back, emaciated and utterly worn out, ragged and verminous, broken in all but spirit. I spoke with numbers of the men. They had been told by the Germans, they said, that they were going to work on the land. They found that only the women and girls were put to farm labor.