GERMANY’S SURRENDER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 2015, 14 August 1919, Page 4

GERMANY’S SURRENDER.

REASONS FOR ARMISTICE.

COMPLETENESS OF VICTORY,

In the course of a speech in London, at a welcome tendered to Sir David Beatty and himself, FieldMarshal Earl Haig said that they rejoiced with their comrades of the sister-service in the great and Tinparalleled triumph that hut lately was theirs. If any of them felt regret that the end came as it did without a last light, the army did not share with them that regret, for, while there could be no doubt upon the utter completeness of their victory or upon the supreme credit it reflected upon them, the army was glad that they and the country were spared unnecessary loss. After all, with them in the army, events at the last followed much the same course, and did so because of their deliberate choice. It would have been possible, after the great culminating defeat indicted on the enemy on the Sambre on November 4th, 1918, and the following days, to have refused to grant the armistice the enemy sought for, and, instead, to have pressed forward with what speed the state of their communications would have let them. To have done so, however, would have meant further loss of life, the destruction of property, and expenditure of money, while it could not have rendered Germany more helpless militarily than she was to-day, with her army dissolved, her guns, transport, and aeroplanes surrendered, and the crossings of the Rhine held by the Allies. If they should have to go to Berlin, they could do so far more easily now than they could have done last November.

Continuing - , the Field-Marshal said ho could not pretend to deserve all the too generous references which had been made to him, but. he should certainly deserve them less and should have ill-requited the services of the glorious army that fought so magnificently throughout the great advance, had he spent men’s lives in pursuit of the shadow when the substance of victory was already achieved. Anyone who today thought, that the armistice was granted too soon, failed to appreciate either the conditions in which the war was fought in these days of armies of millions, equipped with many thousands of machine-guns vast artilleries, etc., or the completeness of I lie surrender Germany made when she look the only terms of armistice the Allies were prepared to grant her. The surrender of the German Heel was not more abject, more complete, or more irrevocable.