THRIUGH GERMAN SPECTACLES.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 207, 8 September 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

THRIUGH GERMAN SPECTACLES.

HUN MARTYRDOM UNDER BRITISH MURDERERS.

A RACE OF MURDERERS. The "Rheinisch Westfalische Ze'tung" propounds the cheering theory that the German people need no longer worry themselves with forebodings. The "vile English" are merely a race or murderers, and just as the monsters or the prehistoric past engendered thenown destruction, so the immutable laws of nature decree the doom of the British monsters of to-day. It is a pretty idea and very prettily worked out :

It was with murder that this war bean, and'from the one crime there has been born a fury of murder more horible than the history of mankind has ever shown s ; nce the days when the world was peopled by monsters whoso whole being was devoted to murder, and whom nature had dowered with terrible weapons such as are no longer found to-day in the possession of a l'ving being. They have died out, those saunans, probably because the ; r capacities ■were limited to the act of throttling or crushing to death, because they could do noth'ng but destroy. Therefore the world that environed them rose up against tliem, and finally destroyed the destroyers. They have disappeared without leaving a trace behind, those murderers of prehistor-

ic times. Herein lies our comfort. I heir whole life was murder; hence they had to disappear. The present war is naught but murder, the murder.of the present generation of man, bestial murder and destruct'on. Nature is cruel, but ever just, and'as she doomed the frightful monsters of antiquity, the murderers of vanished days,'to ITestruction, so has she decreed the ruin and death of the presently human monsters, the murderers of the German nation, these vile English and their worthy tributary rcodlgs .Murder must recoil on the murderer, and bring lus own death. This is nature's immutable law; therefor*, 0 martyred German people, worry not overmuch over the problems of victory or defeat; plague not yourselves with presages and forebodings. Nature has decreed the destruction of the arch-murderer 4 rom across the Channel, and when her chosen moment arrives ye shall find that nature's vengeance is sweet indeed.

THE UNSPEAKABLE HUN. There are other cancTiuTates, even in Germany itself, for the operation of nature's immutable law. The Berlin " Vorwarts" says:— The unscrupulous manner in which the preparation of various articles oi food is being carried on has again been strikingly exemplified n Leipzig. A master baker, C. A. Babitz, thi owner of one of the foremost fashionable establishments in Le : pzig, has been found guilty of the most shameless transgress'on of all existing laws and regulations. His worst practice of all was to bake live maggots in his cakes. On an asistant showing him that the dough was full of these vermin, Rabitz contented himself with covering them up beneath a layer ot dough. "No need-to remove the maggots"" he observed, "people will eat the cakes all the same." The maggot paste was thereupon duly baked ' into cakes. Rabitz had also prepared another kind of confection, styled "dessert cake," from ground wood and potato flour, in which quantities of ants and even bugs were present. This infamous specimen of the baker tribe received five months' imprisonment, besides being condemned to pay a tine of £3l.

"STRAFED."

England, according |to the Berl.ll "Lokalanzeigor," & a s reaped at any rate one advantage from the war. She lias added a new word to her vocabulary : * The phrase - Gott strafe England has exerted so tremendous an influence on the imagination of the English people that the verb "strafen" (to punish) has penetrated in the form of "strafe" into the language, and is now universally employed in aristocratic salons no less than in the streets and plates of popular resort.

Everytlrng and everybody is being "strafed"' daily, from Asquith and Grey down to the butcher, who charges twice the proper price for a pound of h,eefsteak. Young lieutenants "strafe" their women friends when the latter keep them waiting a long time at tho trysting place, wiv.es "strafe"' their husbands because they try to forget amid the noise and clatter of the "saloon liar" the intolerable worries into which the war has plunged them. AYitli more than ordinary vehemence, too, do the people, "strafe' the incapable Government, which every one agrees is simply allowing the (ontry to drift down the stream towards the maelstrom of destruction. Still, everything has its compensations, and if the English have lost all —power, prestige. : nfluence, evne wealth—they have at least gained one thing by the war, a new word specially " made in Germany. which will console them amid all their grief and disappointment,