NAVAL "ALL QUIET"

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 155, 23 February 1932, Page 2

NAVAL "ALL QUIET"

STRIKING BOOK ON GERMAN I NAVY DURING I WAR. I THE "KAISER'S COOLIES." ! LONDON, Saturday. | A grisly picture of German sea- | men's life in wartime is painted by I Theodore Plivier, an ex-sailor, in a i novel, "The Kaiser's Coolies," paral- \ leling Remarque's "All Quiet on the j Western Front." ; ; The illustrations include a photo- : graph ' of the Blucher sinking, with j men crawling on the bottom. The story I opens in a tavern in 1914, where mer- i chant sailors are shanghaied for the ] fleet. | It relates how they rot from scurvy | on the equator, drown in the North ] Sea, or mutiny. The threads of indivi- ' dual tragedies are interwoven with Germany's collapse.- ' The author represents officers as drunken and brutal, feasting while J the men starved. The men, he says, ' were savagely punished, cruelly illtreated, and always on the verge of mutiny. A war historian, Mr. H. W. Wilson, in an article in the Daily Mail, says he doubts whether the conditions were as bad as Plivier represents or the Germans would not have fought so well. Nevertheless. the hook is a vahxable contribution to war literature. | Smashed Bodies. .Plivier describes the eruiser Ariadne collapsing under fire from the British. i "There is a burst of flame. Boots, debris, and fittings are torn from their places, and become hurtling projectiles. i

"Air pressure tosses men's bodies like autumn leaves, smashing them against iron walls. Whole sections of the crew vanish. The decks are swept clean." Crumbling Crew. A close-up description of a gun turret on the Seydlitz after the battle of the Doggerbank, when a British shell set fire to an ammunition magazine, discloses the gun crew at their posts, in lifelike attitudes. ° ( "Their faces are colourless, without even the dull phosphor-blue glow of dead eyes, but instead, burnt-out dark hollows. Dockyard workers touch them, horror-striken. The bodies crumble to dust and fragments of white bone." | The Kaiser arrives to inspect the fleet, and says to the lieutenant, "It j must have been warm work in that I turret." The lieutenant replies, "Yes, your Majesty. Several thousand degrees." ;