Again, Barbusse

At Paris Novelist Henri Barbusse, winner of the Prix Goncourt with his pen and the Croix de Guerre with his sword, occupies a position unique and anomalous. He is always bringing some unpleasant fact to light, and his genius is always just sufficient to make the expose nauseatingly unforgettable. With such a man what is to be done? He was among the first to turn up to view the festering underside of Glory in his War novel Le Feu (Under

Fire). But after all it is not possible to redeem war from its baseness, merely to please M. Barbusse. "In God's name, let us forget the stench, since we must fight through it!" wailed the distracted bourgeoisie when they read Le Feu and promptly tossed it into the fire. Last week M. Barbusse returned from a trip through "Europe's Little Hell: the Balkans" and many readers of Le Quotidien threw that newspaper into the fire rather than endure his searing expose.

Reign of Torture. M. Barbusse characteristically charges nothing less than that the governments of Roumania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Jugoslavia "maintain their supremacy through methods which make the Spanish Inquisition appear sweet and humane by contrast."

He declares: "In the central police station at Belgrade, Jugoslavia, there is in regular use a brazier on which the bodies of prisoners from whom information is wanted are presented to the flames. . . . Needles are stuck into the tongues of suspects and red-hot pins are forced under their nails. . . . There is at hand a special machine designed to squeeze the head until the skull is fractured.* . . .

"At Choumen, Bulgaria, a special electric treatment is applied by experts to the more tender membranes and organs of the body, in order to make the suspected man or woman talk. Several persons have died under this treatment. . . .

"At Varna, Bulgaria, when suspects are examined, three automobile motors running at full speed drown their cries. . . .

"The notorious Bulgarian sadist, Colonel Kousmazov, has quelled several riots by killing various suspected young men under the eyes of their parents and then forcing the latter to kiss publicly the hands of the dead. . . . Dogs were allowed to fight over the bodies of these men for days afterward. . . . On another occasion suspected young men were tied with ropes and dragged through the streets behind trucks until they died. . . .

The sheerest sadism prevails throughout typical Balkan police stations. . . . Brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, children and parents: they are flogged by the police before one another's eyes upon the least pretense of obtaining information. . . .

"There is not any method, beastly or exquisitely refined, that the police commissars, detectives, officers, and often judges themselves, have not employed in order to inflict the maximum physical pain without actually killing when information is desired. Beatings are administered until the victims faint and then they are revived with cold water and the process is repeated. Boiling water is poured into the ears. Their nails are pulled out. Burning hot eggs are applied under the arm pits, creating incurable wounds. . . .

"Several instances are known to me in which mothers were nailed up to the wall before their sons, as was Christ when crucified. .

*A torture of immemorial antiquity, performed by the ancient Greeks with the aid of a rope knotted about the brow, beneath which a stick was inserted and turned end over end, thus tightening the rope. Classical writers have noted that the eyes of the victim bulged from their sockets as the torture proceeded.