Germany and the Somme.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 233, 8 December 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

Germany and the Somme.

FIRST REALISATION OF BRITAIN'S LAND POWER

DREAD AND DISILLUSION.

ISY FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE.

Late Berlin Correspondent- of '"The Daily Mail.

Hindenburg >wa» in the west less than a fortnight ago. He scurried to the east to superintend Mackensen'* operations in the Dobrudja and mark -a his arrival there by receiving tlie German special correspondents. They ux»rO forthwith charged to convey to the home public- a message from the idol upon whom the hopes of all Huns are now nailed. " Tell them from me," said HindenbuTg, ''that the watch on the Somme stancls firm and safe. All goes well with us in the west.'' Smce then—within a bare week—the ■ Germans have made perhaps their greatest discovery of the war, have added to their ever-growing list of miscalculations probably the most glaring yet recorded. They have come to realise that the world's first Sea Power has become, as if by a,lchemy. one of the world's greatest Military Powers. No awakening of the German conscieneeness can have been ruder; no shock to Germans' pre-conceived, deepimbedded theories of Britain's latent force can have been more staggering, for no dream has been more sweetly dreamt by Germany during the past two years of travail than the comforting vision of a "selfish" Britain, ringed by iier security-breeding seas, "untrained'' in the military arts, an armyscorning Britain, a Britain which wis too "indolent" to organise an Army and too "ignorant," by inherited tradition, intelligently to employ it even if it brought the makeshift into existence. It is a far cry from the vulgar caricatures of "Simplicissimus" and "Lustige Blatter" of the autumn of 1914, depicting long-legged Engender with leonine teeth and pip.\s fleeing pan-ic-stricken from pursuing Germans. On the Sonime Germans have discovered that a race of Britons beyond their wildest imaginings has, like dragon's teeth, sprung from the earth, to smit3 "the invincible Army" in a way that Gneisenau and Clausewitz and Moltko would have believed incredible

THE TANK THE SY.MBOI

To me, whom observation in Berfin so long made familiar with Germans' contempt for British military possibilities, the Tank is the perfect symbol of the astonishment which is now filling the German soul with regard to the unfolding of British land power. Just as oim trench-eating land-sliark has stunned the enemy with its gargantuan dimensions, its uncanny versatility, and its imperviousness to shock, so has the revelation of the new Army's mere existence, to say nothing at all of :••; capabilities, dawned upon the whole Gorman nation. For the absolute'y unexpected has come to pass. My memories travel back to the German winter before the war, the winter of Zabern. Prussian militarism, as exemplified by its brutal disregard of elementary civilian rights, was under public fire as it had never been before. 1 sought an interview with a colonel (f the. Guards whom I knew. I picked him out because he had lived abroad for many years, knew Anglo-Saxou countries well, and had served in the free and easy atmosphere of republican armies in South America. I knew be eoudl diagnose abern for me in much more intelligent and intelligible fashion than a Potsdam martinet whose knowledge of the world was confined to tho Mark Bradienburg. He did not disappoint me. I gained precisely the Prussian point of view which I was bent upon gathering. But what he said to me about England and English "military ideals" was equally interesting, and in the light of present events n the Somme was of illuminating psychological value. "However faithfully you reproduce our Prussian conception of the omnipotence of the uniform," said my colonel —who has for two years now been 1 General of Division m the east — " I cannot imagine that you will Tic able to make English understand it. Nobody knows less about soldiering than an Englishman. He is lazy. Ho loves leisure. He lives for week-ends, do despises 'a common soldier.' He will sometimes not admit him even into second-rate public-houses. If he is an officer he spends most of his time trying to get out of uniform and keep out of it. He is a first-rate sportsman and almost always a gentleman. But ho was not made to fight. He looks upon war as sublimated football or bunting. The tune may come when England will want an Army worthy of the name. But as armies cannot be 'stamped out of the ground' I fear it will be an eternity before she ever gets one."

SECOND GREAT ILLUSION. I should like to commie with General von B to-day. 1 should not need to tell him such to convince him that his judgment of three years ago was mvopic bevond belief; for he would have read his "Frankfurter Zeitung" and his "Cologne Gazette"' and Ins "Lokal-An-zeiger" by now, and they would have saved me the trouble. Beneath ttdi-tule headlines like "Gigantio Battle on the Sommc." "Tlio Furious Struggle in the West." and "Murderous Artillery Duels in Picardv." German newspapers, as much as they dared, have for nearly o fortnight boon showing General B and all his hind and countrymen that their Great Illusion lias li.'i'ii the myth of British

negligibilty . It is their second Great Illusion about Britain. Tiio first was the grotesque

confidence of August 15)14 that Albion

would again He perfidious. It took less than 72 hours to banish that mirage.

ft lias taken two years for the Greater j Illusion to lie dispelled. TV Soratne has done it with a crash and a roar ; so deafening that hardly a stricken ! homo in all the Fatherland but has heard i: and come to realise its por- ; tentious d<■vilisbness. Some day tne Germans will hav,e a reckoning with such of then- War Lords as survive (lie carnage. "When explanations are called for. none, as I know the German mind, j will be half so imperiously demanded a* one which shall elrar up the dccad,"-old fraud perpetrated by German military "experts" that Britain, as ;i Land Power in "our coming war.'' might be relegated contemptuously to the scrapheap reserved for bagatelles. What has produced this revolutionary new state of mind, or state of distraction, in the German people For many months they have had the evidence of British newspapers and of tlvir highly perfected Intelligi nee Service in Fugland to persuade them that Britain's military effort, slow-starting as it was, was bound sooner or later to attain an iresistible crescendo. Tlvy have seen the vast development of munition production. They have witnessed the accomplishment of what they have been sedulously trained to regard as impossible—the introduction of Universal Military Service. Tiny have watched

OUR AIRMEN

h phenomenon which their political prolessors and publicists educated them to look upon as equally chimerical —thy muster of the whole Empire for Free- • dom's common cause. All tlitfce things they have seen and inwardly digested, yet the Germans scorned and doubted. The one thing capable of impressing the German mind had to be invoked—- ! anniliilating Force. When the hour 1 came to hurl that Force against the 1 linos opposite the British Sonime front, the kncil of Germany "s awakening I struck. As Force continued to he , hurled, not in diminuendo but with increasing intensity, the scales fill from ' horrified Teuton eyes with eorrcspoiidj rapidity. "This is not war. It is slaughter!" exclaims one ''inspired" scribe on the I shell-wrecked front. "When will this murder end-'' whines another. "The I German tribes are bleeding and dying | out hero in endless misery/' moaneu : the "Cologne Gazette" early in Septem- , lier

" Formerly there wore lulls in tho hellish Allied artillery attacks.'' said the " Frankfurter Zeitung" on September 14, and continued: " Now they give us rest neither by day nor by night. The effect of such all-day arid all-night fire makcis demands on the nerves of our troops such as thev never before had to endure. Ijhey all say : thio same thing—physical privations, thirst more than hunger, can be more easily borne than this uubrokctn strain on all their spiritual powers of resistance. It often happens that men are buried beneath debris hurled upon them by the explosion of shells, and it has been found that such experiences are more destructive to morale than actual wounds.

•'troops must he relieved in the midst of battle, often in the very thick of an enemy onslaught. It is almost entirely impossible to reach the desired firing-lin n s in close formations—lines which were once a position and which can now even with guides be located with difficulty. Reliefs take place lalmad curtain fire which often shrouds the battle-zone for miles."

Here is tho testimony of a correspondent of the leading Riieiiish-Westph.il-ian industrial organ, the Dusseldorf " Genera I-Anzeiger:

"One cannot conceive the conditions which human beings have to endure amid this never-ceasing horror. The Somme battles have now lasted over two months, and traops exposed in the worst positions before Verdun declare that things there were, in comparison, easy. .

In these circumstances the very excess of horrors, by blunting the sensibility, acts as a boon, leaving only room for one elementary reflection: 'Here, in this fresh hell, it will be all over with me.' The idea is stated without complaint or pain, and the only wish accompanying it is that death may come and hurl one through the dark door of eternity with the swiftness of lightning. It is like the end of the world. The earth trembles so that one is almost thrown to the ground."

It is not only British guns of annihilating power and shells of all-destroying cxplosiveness which are battering German morale and churning Marshall's and Kirchbach's trenches into charnelhouses. I read between the lines of German corespondents' narratives cf the fighting that British aircraft is doing almost as much as British artillery ie> sap the enemy's battle strength.

"They hover over us in nests," said th.e ''Frankfurter Zeitung's" correspondent. Not a single man dare show himself in the open, hist these eagles 'spot' him and draw upon the place of his abode a devouring fire. And as if distracting our attention from tho horrors waiting in front of us were not enough, these remorseless watchers in the sky swoop down upon our trenches and spit death at us with machine guns."

The Allies" Somme offensive liad been in progress for more than two months when Hindenburg inspected the region n fortnight ago. But lie obviously came to the conclusion that it was more or less a "spent" offensive. The 'inspired' German Press throughout August and well into September tveasely liarped on tho "cheeking'' of the Anglo-French advance. It was as good as an "abandoned enterprise," the country was told. Losses had been siekeuingly "out of proportion to territory gained," the General Staff averred. "Months will probably elapse," it added, " before the baffled enemy will find courage and resources to renew the onslaught begun in such grandiloquent fashion and ended so disastrously." Hindenburg came, saw, and was reassured. The "worst was over." He could safely desert a side-show for th«* more important performance which Mackensen and the Bulgar and Turkish dupes in Rumania were conducting. Then September 15 arrived. Ther' can be little doubt that the ferocity ot the British attack came with all the force of a tremendous surprise. German newspapers dealing with it have only just tx'gun to reach England. Their page-wide headlines, after several previous days' effort to portray lighting in the east as the dominant feature of ti.-j campaign, disclos* plainly that no more illusions are cherished as to the magnitude of the battle of the Somme.

<; Heroic resistance by our troops. partly in the slu»i)o of energetic coun-ter-attacks," writes Hirr Georg Wegener t.nder da to ot September 1!' in tin- " Lokal-Anzoigor" of Wednesday last, "diiveloped at eountV'ss points of tin- blond-soaked battlefield into indescribably bitter struggles, which attain and again raged in the form of violent hand-to-hand lighting." Nowhere in this latest German narrative of the Sonime. slaughter i- there talk of aught but boating hack, as It.'St the legions of the Kaiser can, the incalculable new Force with which they now have to reckon. Many Gilrmaiis liave learivd during the war to read between the lines of what is offered them as the truth. Between tin halfadmissions and dissembling which protrude from the Lokal-Anzeigor's vei-sion of the hVhting which liogan yesterday week, Germans can see. if th.'\v can see. anything, that their "tribes'' aiv "bleeding and dying'' not to conouor but to avert annihilation. Herr Wegener hold oils little hope ot any improvement in Germany's hell on th | Somme. ''The continuous, unceasing, extraordinarily violent artillery fin> on both sides," he savs, "seems tn indicate that no sla-ckening of the battle is to be expected."

OUR ARTILLERY.

I am not accustomed to search for the. truth .military or political, in the semi-omeial "Cologne Gazette." Yet listen to its confession of the devastating effect of Allied artillery on the Somme during the closing day-, of last week and the opening hours of this. I quote from the issue of September 19:

'• Perhaps under the hailstorm of projectiles of all calibres the cellars of houses of some villages remain intact, but otherwise there is nothing anywhere except shell-craters, vast gaping ditches, or deserts of ruins, whoso occasional still recognisable particles may now and then provide evidence that a building for human habitation on;y stood there. The difference between the yawning chasms torn by shells in the open fields and demolished trenches and dug-outs is not large. . ."

Visualise that what are now distinguishable ruins were a few days ago the shelt'ring-place of German divisions and you will grasp what tin* '•'Cologne Gazette" means but dare not say.

I should like to make two points clear, lest I be charged with calculated under-statcment. First, the revelation to Germans of the New France is no less in portent than their discovery that Britain is a first-class Land Power. Germans realise that it is the combined might of the British and French armies which is smashing Marschall and Kirchbach on the Somme. They have long acknowledged the military qualities and prowess of the French, though under-estimating them at the same time. Britain's army only looms bigger in their vision now because it has been traditionally held up to them as a contemptible mediocrity in both quality and quantity. Secondly let no British reader discern between my lines any blithe assurance that the cud of German resistance is ahand. That would be as fatuous a phantom as, let me say, the belief that the Gorman Army is running short of guns o rshells. The right beginning was made when Germany was given ocular demonstration that Britain's power is not confined to the, waves. The rest will bo duly forthcoming.