GERMAN BALLOONS LANDING IN FRANCE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 10061, 1 February 1909, Page 4

GERMAN BALLOONS LANDING IN FRANCE.

When Kaiser William recently approached the borders of France and gazed from the heights of Alsace upon the valleys below, there was an outcry as from a chicken-yard over which the shadow of an eagle's wing has passed. The recent landing in France of German war-bal-loons, on nothing more than practise or pleasure bent, has created equal commotion in the French press. The dates and 'places of these descents are given with full circumstantiality, and the dread espionage has become so great that the French. Ambassador at Berlin has been ordered to calT tho attention of the German Government to this matter. As most of the dirigibles carry officers, and as they come down in "the four corners" of France, the Petit Parisien is convinced of their sinister intentions. Between fifteen and twenty of such aerial ships have crossed the French, borders between April 16 and November 9 of the past year, and, "in reality," declares the Paris journal ouoted above, "their object is to land spies, and their visits are intolerable. The French Government, always careful of the national security, is justly pertuibed." A much more important organ, the Figaro, is not so easily frightened. In a long article in this paper Mr Alphonse Berget, a savant of high authority, professor at the Oceanographic Institute, and author of many meteorological works, declares that the course of balloons starting from Berlin is largely controlled by fixed meteorological laws, under tlie influence of the Gulf Stream. The German aeronauts naturally prefer to steer for France rather than be carried on to the Baltic. He thinks that France has more to fear from the anti-militarists and other disaffected members of her army than from the German officers who land to the west of the Yosges. He speaks as follows : —"We may rest in perfect cheerfulness with regard to these German aeronauts. They threaten no prying into the secrets of our national defence, and if, as our friends tells lis, we 'must take measures to protect our country, measures the most energetic and immediate,' we- think they had better be directed to the purging of our arsenals of such elements as the Internationalists, elements much more dangerous than certain balloons, which, even if they are a little larger than those in the museum of the Louvre, and bear the trade-mark 'made in Germany,' by no menus constitute 'foreign peril.'" Although the German Press laugh at the French as being affected with a new disease which they style "espionitis," the Government of' Prince von Billow has taken heed of tlie complaint of the French Ambassador, .is we learn from the following official note in the Koetniche Zeitung: —" Up to the present time German baloons, on landing in French territory, .have been well received by the authorities as well as by the general French population. Fearing, however, that unpleasant consequences It ay result from such landings, the Ambassador of France has drawn the attention of the Government to this practice. As a consequence luc German military authorities have at once taken measures to preclude, as far j as possible, the landing of German aerostates outside the frontiers of Germany. '