The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 1916. THE ROAD TO VICTORY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 25, 28 August 1916, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 1916. THE ROAD TO VICTORY.

Steady daily gains of great importance on the Western front continue to be made by the Allies. The enormous German forces thrown against

us prove unavailing and each attack merely results in tremendous enemy] losses. It may be considered that German tactical offensive has failed, but though that is undoubted, and we are gaining almost daily some hundreds of yards of the enemy’s supposedly impugnable trenches with small losses m ourselves, we not be disappointed if sensational. German collapses do not immediately] follow. A notable military writer in the Westminster Gazette remarks that discussions about the gain or loss of “ground” in what we know must be a war to the death are, wholly secondary, yet gains or losses of ground have rather come to fill the public imagination almost to the exclusion of tlm far, more important object—the destruction of men. Soldiers and the public—if the public may bo gauged by the Press—look at the war from quite different standpoints. Soldiers estimate it by rela-j tive casualties and wastage. “ r J lie public estimate it,” he concludes, “by the reported gain or loss of this or that trench, bill, or village. The dominant purpose —-the slaughter of the German horde—is lost sight oi altogether.” Germany’s position has compelled the most desperate mea-j sures, and they have failed with great] enemy losses, but our leaders would have almost nullified their advantages if our men were sent to costly and premature assaults. It has been plainly said that: “To look at the war as first of all a man-killing busi-j ness may seem cold-blooded, but that is how men at the front have to look al it and that is what it is.” And it might bo added that the nations who arc \fighting the. world’s menace of Germanism have simply to kill or i )0 killed; on that subject the Germans have no scruples whatever. Germany set out to kill and slaughter ruthlessly all who stood in the way of Prussian ambition, and orginally held the view that the immense preparedness, the great superiority of Gorman artillery and the ferocious suddenness of attack would lead to a speedy victory for the Kaiser’s arms. But the soldierly skill and lorlitude of the Allies in those dark early days kept the enemy at bay. It was the men and not the guns that out when all seemed lost. “Both A pres and Verdun,” says the -'writer quoted, “prove that the attempt by the employment of huge numbers to rectify

the fundamental miscalculation upon which the Germans went into the war, means losses they cannot keep up. It is a remarkable and certainly striking fact that for the number of men and guns engaged no armies in any war have ever accomplished so little as the Germans have in these battles. In substance that is why they are beaten. We need not he afraid to use the word.” The view thus expressed is proved a very correct one iu the light of the later happenings on all the fronts.