State Library of NSW
[Page 82]
Lieut Col Nash
S.S. KyarraAlexandria18 Janry 1914
My dear GirlsMy colleague in a voice that is that of the typical larakin is reading from French into English the speech of Cardinal Mercier (Pastoral letter) to the Belgian people. The same sentences he is reading for a second time, why I do not know. "It is not true that the state is a Moloch upon which the people must be slaughtered. That the State is omnipotent … No the civil life is peace ordered …" And so on. My French is bad indeed mayhap. "The best of our children are entombed." Words brought upon the Author the roughness of the Kaiser's government. "Belgium suffers cruelly." He has stopped again and says things which cannot be written here. The best of her children are entombed in our forts, on our fields of battle, in defence of our rights. Soon there will be no longer in the whole of family, one family who is not, who has not had some one killed. Why O God all these sufferings, I myself have seen ruins, ashes, surpassing imagination. Schools, churches, char. insts [charitable institutions], hospitals, convents reduced to ruins or rendered uninhabitable. Entire villages have practically disappeared. The State is not a Molloch upon whose altar all lives are a legitimate sacrifice. The brutality of pagan manners & the despotism of the Caesars
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