DIFFERENT NATIONALITIES IN BATTLE

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1601, 22 August 1916, Page 4

DIFFERENT NATIONALITIES IN BATTLE

According to an American writer, German army officers hold the following views of the qualities and characteristics of the various nonTeutonie soldiers: —“The French soldier is gallant, nervous, and very brave, only it is difficult to make him return to a second or third time into the same tire. The English fighter is dogged and individually resourceful. The Italian, though ferocious in assault, is discouraged by failure. He goes on one impulse and hates to repass his own dead for a second charge. That is how a German sees three of his adversaries. As to a fourth, he volunteers nothing, but if he is pressed, he will add: ‘The Russian is terrible.’ The meaning of that assertion develops slowly, with many hesitations. It is not that the individual Russian soldier is particularly terrible. No, that is not what he means to say. The Russian cannot he singularised. You have to think of Russians, infinite in plurality, a slow-moving, ominous, imposing mass. They come in lines ten and twelve deep, heedless and heavy, so controlled by their own momentum that they cannot stop. They will go as if they did not know how to be afraid. ‘The only thing you can do,’ says the German officer, ‘is to slaughter them and pray that you will have ammunition enough to keep it up.’ ”