HOW THE BRITISH REGARD THE PRUSSIAN MACHINE.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 195, 28 July 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

HOW THE BRITISH REGARD THE PRUSSIAN MACHINE.

By IGNATIUS PHAYRE.

No one subject to the Word of Command may have any will of his own. Here is the voice of Germany's war oracle—of grim Yon Clauswitz, the high priest of that Schrecklichkeit, or Frightfulness, which the Kriegsministerium reduced to writing in a code that staggered the- world in Professor J. H. Morgan's translation. " but why slip torpedoes at a helpless packet boat?"' asks the New l'orfc journalist of the L-boat ''hero," with whom he sits over beer and war bread at the Cafe Bauer in the famous Li tden. "Superior orders/' is the laconic eply. "We do as we're told," say the crew of the Lls, when questioned upon tlii ethics of hurling monstrous thennitc and H.E. bombs from n .ht with no target at till bei w lut only hated England. Now, it is r'>lniiu. obedience which makes tlie Go,man EniDire to-day so formidable a mcu;ice to progress and civilisation - tin! i• v or, as Kipling calls her — '"built n-on anozance and disciplined in evil."

There you have it. "Disciplined ri evil" is "the secret of Prussian mass courage such as we saw displayed oefore Verdun, where Fh-eneh gunners turned away and wept at the awesome harvest that went down I>ofor.e the "drum fire" of their massed batteries. We saw it aurselves at the, First and Second Battles cf Yppes, where the fine flower of the Prussian Guard went goose-steppiHg, as though on parade, te wholesale destruction. I've sat bv the bed of keen professional soldiers (writes Ignatius Pliayre, in the "War Budget") and talked this matter over with them. "We commence,'' was the way a Highland captain put it to :ne, "where the Germans leave ofF. The unit in their army is the N.C.0.. whereas with us it is the individual soldier. Tommy's at his best when he's fighting under no other control than his own robust and quenchless spirit. You can't suppress the British soldier. You can't im-press or de-press him. Behind the lines he's boxing or playing football. As for Fritz, he's utterly squelched by rigid mechanical discipline. He must not think. All thinking is done by the officer and his N.C. 0. This works well enough at Jong range, but the present siege of positions is really a soldier's war, und that's where Tommy si-ores. HELPLESS IF LEADER LESS. "For without leaders the German soldier seems curiously helpiess. lie shows little in'ative, and the gleam oi a baydtaet sends up his arms in pleadir. r. surrender. On the other hand, it >s this close work that makes our men sew red, and grow 'berserk' in the famous 'mad minute' of their charge. And they perform prodigies in that mood —witness the last stand of the Ministers 'n the retreat from Mons. Our fellows fight like demons, fight with their own eyes as well as their own arms, with coo! brain as well as with a great heart. "It is this iniative which enabled us to hold our own in those epic days of the war, when for three weeks a slim force of our lads held at bay and cut up eight whole divisions of the foe." Thei •e is overwhelming testimony that "militarism" does not breed the ideal soldier —n social fact of enormous significance. Tf it did. the German should be worth two or three Britons instead of the converse being the case. Wo know how war is glorified in Geeman eyes as a thing divine in itself. The school-child is fed with sayings ot the truculent. Saxon historian, Treitsc'hke; of blood-and-iron Bismarck, and ruthless sold>ers like von Moltke, to whom peace ivas an unlovely dream. "But God will g<ie to it/' the great, strategist was glad to think, "that war will always recur."

For the good of the human race, of course, and Germany's due dominion So the sword became the State emblem. There are monuments to it; marks of t scar the Umversitv student's face, and at the clank of the scabbard and spur the mere civilian steps into the gutter to give swaggering way to the officer caste. Before me as I write are two astonishing mementoes of this madness—tho one a baby's rattle in the shape f a Zeppelin bomb and the other a rosarv of prayer with a miniature shell for each Our Father and an Iron Cross for the last triumphant "Gloria"! WAR AS "THE" CAREER. So frcm tho cradle to the grave the German 'ooks upon war as the noblest of all ends and careers. Moreover, the women, banished as they are to "kitchen, church, and nursery," support this lunacy in th.e wildest way. Think of little girls collecting sacks of acorns in the woods in order to send eight marks to that patriarch of frigid childmurder, Ferdinand von Zeppelin. "M ay we children send Your High Excellency a little money, which please to give to the hero who threw the last bombs on London." Here, surely, 's perversion too dreadful for tears. And this war-worship it is which Hies at the root of Germany's mass courage. It puts the whole empire in i state of Kriekskemass, or war-readi-ness. Civilians and soldiers alike give blind obedience to the Clausowitz word of command —the "Kruppisni and CorporaFsin" which amazed Matthew Arnold half a century ago. At home >ve have seen a Zabern heavily visited h r smiling at Dogberry in officer's tunic, and in the field we see eight-fold infantry charges in dense column formation with certain units losing sixty per cent, of their effectives before the final molting away of ail attack. "The enemy has failed in bloody hecatombs,-' says the calm communique from classic Verdun. "It was lik-2 scythe-work on a colossal scale," n Krench officer told me. "We held our breath, watching the wide gaps as our 7-Vs and hcivies belched forth wit'.i earth-shattering crasties. Eight thousand corpses in one narrow sector. Dying and dead rolled down the slope and mas-id in heaps wlnre curve )l the ground collected them. SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER. "Swaying on our wire were and groups of bodies most dreadfully torn. We saw more and more 'sheep' forced onward by their uteroffiziors. These menaced the troops with revolvers, and even machine-guns, to climb over the mounds of corpses in front ot them. And tlr.s they did in tho face of our nevei-ceasing avalanche of roaring Heme. I saw entire ranks go down moaning, or s.t'll and stark, ani'd the IJig urey h"aps of slain. Oh, it was blood-curdling to think of. and the horror <.« our sleeping nights." Hut let. no man say these Germans brink from the last sacrifice of all. The way of the shepherd with the sheep l* peculiarly Prussian. At Neiive Chapel V> our officers found the- first eat-o'-n no tails in the haversack of a German non-com. And the prisoners liavo told how savagely it is used in the trench il a man bo slow to move or to obey. Near R.he'ms tho French found Bavarian gunners chained to their maxims, and

on the T)vinsk front steel' cages were provided for the crews of revolverguns. No facts of this war are so well established as the utter disregard which Germany has for the lives of her soldiers and the brutality with which these are treated by their leaders in the field. Private Karl Schulz was savagely lashed in the face with a riding whip for giving a cigarette to .in English prisoner. Germans captured by us have openly confessed to murder* : ng officers who hud exceeded even tlie Prussian limit as enforcers of discipline At La Ferte a French inn-keeper's wif-j was threatened with death for interceding .with Captain von Bulow on behalf of he was kicking and boating in a murderous style.

The man had been told to hang up a lantern outside the officer's mess and had been forgetful or too slow about h : s task. Von Bulow knocked the fellow down, jumped upon him as he lay, thei kicked h ; m savagely on the head, and smashed at his face with the scabbard of his sabre. Yet throughout this scene discipline was marvellously manifest, for the victim lay still and never uttered a single cry.

Letters taken from dead Germens amply confirm this reign of terror in the ranks. "My dear ones," wrote Se bastion Schauer, of the 13th Bavarian Reserve; "'1 1 fall, write upon my grave:—'He was murdered by the wardens of Kultur!' " And again—this timo from a wife to her complaining spouse in the trench : —" the officers do what they like, however scandalous, for you can't alter the scheme ' t things. But I should certainly show those wounded hands te the colonel. Ho will surely give you leave till e cuts are healed, and make that terrible sergeant understand that he has no rght to flnv a man alive."

GERMAN FATALISM. This fateful acceptance is the trie? spirit of modern Germany. The man >. but a cog in a vast machine, and all his life the glories of that machine, and its huge potentiality, have been dinned into him. "Obey and Aie for the greater glory of Deutsehtum, and be proud in blind obedience and death! You must not think at all. What brain you hare is but tlie beschrankter Untertancverstand —the limited intelligence of an underling to be asserted at your life's peril."

So that German fighters are brave merely in the mass with that curious disregard for their lives which makes the "machine"' so redoubtable a danger to a world warring desperately for light. They believe themselves led by super-men, from tlie great Falkenheyn himself down to the corporal or sergeant who administers corporal ptinis imcnt at his own discretion. And the German has faith in thei machines of the machine —in wondrous inventions of the war chemist, the engineer and inventor, who spring surprise after surprise upon tlio Allied staffs. I refer, of course, to giant guns and poison gas cylinders, to the flame-squir; and ail the scientific- terrors of a siege of positions—a condition for which our enemy was uncannily prepared from • the first. "The chemist keeps his sword [ sheathed," old Bismarck used to say, with quiet gloating. "Yet that swori of his will wm the next great war." Certainly the technical arms which su;> port our enemy have justified this co itidence. The German was the first t.i reintroduce body amour. And he has maelrnes for all things, from cutting through wire jungles to washing shirts and digging trenches or graves. He relies, then, upon the machine, and as a long-range fighter is unsuipassed. On the other hand, put him ti: a tight place, with all his officers fallen, ani Huns has l : ttlc stomach tor the fray. "Kamerad," comes now from his lieaien ditch, and the foe "hangs ■ut a week's washing, as scornful Tommy says of a white flag d splay of indecent liaste and volume. At the same time it were absurd hi deny the German his meed of physical and moral prowess. The famous Fokker pilots, Herren Boelcke and Immelniann, are outstanding cases of pure skill and sngle-handed daring. The last-named was credited with his thirteenth aerial victim, and, throughout fought cleanly and played the game. Another German airman dropped a wreath of remembrance over an Alsatian town, paying a tribute to his French adversary, Pegoud, "who died a hero's death." NOT WITHOUT CHIVALRY. t could relate cases of chivalrous action towards our wounded. So could young recruits swamrng in the open with loud "Hoclis" and student songs. Time after vine they were swept away yet they reformed to advance once more over theijV own dead upon the famous Vimy Ridge. "The German so'diers vary in quality," one of our officers told me—"Saxon, Bavarian, Wurtemburger, and the rest. I consider the Prussian corps d'elite quit? superb soldiers. We've seen them charge twenty-seven times in one day in the teeth of massed guns and our best bombers till the ground was kneedeep in their dead and dying." Another opinion 1 got praised .the "resigned heroism of the German infantry, who give up the r lives as devotees rather than ordinary soldiers."

All our officers agree that- the German sniper is a man of diabolic cunning, entirely reckless of his own safety. Bat even the sniper must be linked with wire with his officer, as part of the mighty machine wlrch "disciplined evil" has raised to such a power, fort'fied by science of a malign and perverted kind. It would be .stupid to belittle the mass-courage of the Kaiser s hordes, or even tho chivalry of sailors like the Count von Spee, who refused to honour the toast of " Damnation to the British Navy" when his adnrrers gave it in far-off Valparaiso. r On land, in the air. and at sea ue clash with a fanatic foe. and, as Kip ling says, no peace may be made with him till the German War-Lord "has been taught that there ,s a God other than his own lust."