World War: In Fields as They Worked

All that remained in Poland last week was aftermath: mopping up, repairs, the sorting of truth from falsehood. One truth reached Manhattan with a famed world traveler and free-lance photographer, Julien Bryan. That it was a truth no one could doubt, for Photographer Bryan had recorded it in grim celluloid and emulsion.

“There was no question,” said Julien Bryan, “but that Germans slaughtered Polish civilians miles from military objectives. It wasn’t a war against soldiers. It was a war against civilians. I arrived in Warsaw after most foreign correspondents had left. Each day I took a car, a camera, and an interpreter and drove out as near the front as I dared go. On September 15, two weeks after the invasion started, I went out to the suburbs on the German side of town.

“A few minutes before several German planes had for no apparent reason bombed a farmhouse. They went away, and after a while seven women who were desperately in need of food went out to scratch for potatoes; not really good ones—small potatoes. They had to eat even if there was a war, and those potatoes were all they could get.

“But the planes hadn’t really gone away. They doubled back, and flying along as low as 200 feet, opened up their machine guns. The women, in absolute panic, tried to run away. The ones who fell down from fear apparently escaped. But two were killed.

“I was talking with the survivors afterward when a little girl—ten or eleven—ran up. Some one had told her that her sister was in the field. Her sister was one of the dead. We helped her find the body,

“I’ve never in my life had such a naturally dramatic scene to take. The child bent down over her sister, refusing to believe what she saw. She touched the dead face tenderly, and exclaimed at its coldness. She began to cry, then, and to talk of how beautiful the face had been. When she stood up, I put my arm around her, and with the little Polish I know, tried to comfort her.”