TWO CAUSES OF COMPLAINT

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2364, 21 January 1915, Page 6

TWO CAUSES OF COMPLAINT

—< *- Both the Cossacks and the Indians fighting at the front have couiplaints to make. Their complaints, on the whole, seem to point.to Lurd Fisher's aphorism that the essence of war is violence. The CosBacks, and particularly tho older Cossacks, are dissatisfied with the strange ways of modern warfare, which provent them getting near enough to the enemy to I cut. off their heads. On the other hand, it cannot bo said that tho Germans have shown any particular humanity to the Cossacks who -have fallen into their hands. They are stated to have made a practice of cutting out a wide welt of flesh where the dis- ' tinguishing red stripe of the Cossack is sewn on his trousors leg. As for tho Indians, they also regret that tho war is not as of old times— "man to man and horse to horse." But, according to one of the wounded Indians in a London hospital, they have a particular cause of grievance against German troops. • The Prussians are too fat to _be easily choked when they come to grips with them. A French war correspondent, speaking of an Indian charge in Flanders which he witnessed, refers to the Ghurkas as "terrible little men." They were sent to the assistance of the London Scottish Territorials, and their work unpleasantly impressed the writer —and the Germans even more. They slipped in like cats between and wider the barbed wire that guarded the German trenches and disappeared. Then arose hoarse cries and screams from the Gorman soldiers as the terrible Indian knifo went home. They were killed— slaughtered—in hundreds. In tho mud of the trenches the Germans fought madly in a panic of fear,.but they could not escape their cat-like, active foe. Tho few prisoners who were taken woro i brought into the • British lines in a state of pitiable tenor. For hours there was no need to guard them. The ', terror of that awful Indian charge had '. deprived thorn of power of volition, almost of power of motion. • \