NO.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 141, 4 February 1916, Page 3 (Supplement)

NO.

By FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE.

Late Berlin Correspondent of " The Daily Mail" and Author of "Men Around the Kaiser." In the midst of a world of muddle, waste, and procrastination, a new and highly efficacious euro for the blues has reached London. It is strictly up to date and it * oiade in Germany. It consists 01 the 10,300 th page of officially acknowledged German casualties, and it denotes tiiat the enemy's looses n the field ai c certainlv not below 3, <OO.OOO in killed, wounded, and prisoners, for the closely packed pages contain on the average 360 names each. Before me as I write lie Lists Nos. 763 to 800 inclusive for the first twenty-two days of November. They contain a total of 195,480 name*, or 3)885 a day. As the German military authorities, for reasons host known to themselves, do not publish their officer casualties (except non-coms.), and the lists are necesarily incomplete, we may safely compute the enemy s day-by-day attrition in Russia. France I'landers. Turkey, and Serbia at close on 10,000 every twenty-four hours. British military authorities, I beliece, possess cv.dence that the German lists do not err on the side of undor-est:mation. The estimate of German wastage as 10 000 a dav is not a figure manufactured from late lists in support of my theory that the Deutsche Verlustlisten are a capital panacea for November glooms. The tell-tale sheets the exact size of a Id. London evening paper, three closely crammed columns to the page —have been accumulating on my desk s nee the hour the war bogan. 'and if I piled them perpendicularly they would long ago have formed a many columned peristyle towering to the ceiling. In all the world s historv there has never been such a death-roll. If it is kept up to the mark for Imperial William's cynosure, it must sicken even him at heart every time he contemplates the rivers of red ink which have been spilled in the recording of it. It must nauseate him for less sentimental reasons besides, for the German General Staff knows that to have the Teuton e armies used up at the rite of 10,000 a day spoils eventual and certain disater. It means that German militar-y strength can bcvitally sapped, or "nibbled," as Pore Joffre puts it. without throwing a single arniv on to German territory. Not that the Hun will be crushed while still in occupation of Belgium, part of France Poland, and Serbia. But that his power to maintain himself there, not to speak of advancing his lines or otherwise stiengthening his hold, is being effectually and steadily diminished by remorseless decui.ation is palpable beyond all question. Even a nation several times Germany's 68,GOO,OOO cannot permanently stand such a drain. HIDING THE TRUTH. One niusL not imagine that because the Germans issue their casualty lists publicly (in November twenty-eight were given out in twenty-two days) the enemy public are "fully acquainted with the enst of their Great Adventure. So far as lies in their power, the military authorities are suppressing the truth by arbitrarily preventing its dissemination through the natural channel of the Press. Newspapers are strictly forbidden from publishing anything but the most uniforming summary of Verlustlisten. Space, indeed, would forbid their reproduction, as is done in England. A paper may only announce in its news columns that So-and-So and So-and-So, a collection of perhaps twenty-five or thirty more or lcs:i well-known names in its own community, are among the dead, wounded, or captured. No paper may print anything in the nature of a tabulation or compulation of losses —or say that to November 22, 10.300 pages of casualties have been issued and that they total, roundly, 3,700,000. ' The lists are sold, not given away, and, as they cost Hd apiece (which i. three times the amount the German pays for his favourite newspaer), that acts, as anybody who knows Teuton tiglit-fi.stednesd will recognise, as a powerful deterrent to the lavish circulation of Verlustlisten. The study of any recent casualty list is instructive to a degree. It reveals, in the first place, that, as an effective mean, of concealing the price of u victory." the General Staff i.o longer identifies the time and place ;.t which recorded losses occurred. Thus we may only guess that the numerous ■entire companies wiped out (for example) ae Infantry-Reserve Regiment No. H i Prussian 1/nt No. 3ly<) or n Infantry-Reserve Regiment No. 103 (Saxon F.ist No. 217) were mown down around l oos or Tahure, or t,wept away by the Russians in the region of Riga, [jvinsk, the Styr, and the Strypa, or perhaps annihilated bv the gallant Scrlis in the fighting tor the towns and fortresses between Belgrade and M ac-edonia. The completenos with which whole compnn'es of German infantry (which number about 250 men) have been rolled up is a striking and constant feature of the casualty 1 ils. No less significant is the almost unvarying loss of each company's fifteen in twen'y non-commissioned officers—the backbone of German infantry units, as Hun mil tary writers traditionally acknowledge. The comparative absence of commissioned officers' names from the — at rare intervals the loss of a lieutenant or a Staff o!iicer is recorded —means either that the Germans' kn'ghtlv martinets are keep. Oil: syst' niatieally out of danger or are be ng put out of act on at a rate winch it is preferred not to acknowledge.

A CKKTAIX KM). 'I . (~ -i ■II ! fr. ':11■ i id; th. \'Vi:r r • • ■. ami ■>'. il ■' Ii pel :l' N ''' ' ■ , '« i>; '■ :ir- •• ••'••• •• ft' v !» ' i " l ' ' jor t ifi ii ' ■ u< i ' i n -1) ,n • •• v I'-' nf tin ' • • itlui all '. (•;!('}] IC . ." tlv M'|)l'l MllU'li ill t. 1 (■: 11 : || ' ; M PnifMall (illiinl is lir it i, •i! :i, whether it he ti ,• lii fin! i \ i ! i !n' 1 • iia I'll. the I 111; il< tiio "i a * i!, ii,.' !• M A It: 11 TV of ill,' (i' .n Pi "I II M>, or ti1,1;,. ,1;,. ' yoi,;hi' li 11' -I ■!_ t;- ! -r'> |c:; '.MS V. Ir> If! - • (lent t H.lll tl" • ' •!; ' l ' " wllX'h nn I inir cut ;n tl,- .'iv <■'< tin' mid-dle-ayod l,ai.-!''. ;.>;•! I "■'* "inn I.n----(r;:(b(nu n up !" '""I !il " Sl|! '- fttihito Infantry" r.'^,n-.- ii« >a] .pi•!-. tp'rur.iph and telephone 'l'tachmcnts, «iip;ilv train-, army -i-rv:<o corps, hoj.itaj units, the flyill" cori^—everylio'ly

in "field grey"—figure in these eloquent 10,300 pages. A disservice indeed would be done to the Allies' cause by trying to make believe that "attrition" alone renders their triumph inevitable. Our need of the hour more urgent than ever is for men, munitions, and money. The more of them there are the quicker will Germany's ID,OOO casualties a day be multiplied to 20,000 and 30,000, and the end toward which she is indubitably headed he correspondingly hastened. The end will not be speedy, but, in my judgment, it is certain.