WAR ITEMS

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 104, 5 January 1915, Page 3

WAR ITEMS

THE GERMAN VIEW. PRESS CALUMNY. MORE ABOUT THE CURSED BRlT-rsi-i. The German papers afford entertaining reading- just now. Hardly one of them fails to have its daily thrust at the country which cheeked its career of lout: HfaJLL-GUOWN LIES. . The British, by their conduct and by their whole way of looking at life, show their inferiority to us (says the "Vossische .Zeitung"). In philosophy, in metaphysics, in all the higher reaches of the intellect they are our pupils. They are very bad pupils, however,, for they have learned nothing from us. The proof of this is to be found in the very fact that they are at war with us, for on their part it is a war of mean rivalry—no more; while on ours it is one for existence. We are fighting for life; they for booty. Our press is irreproachable! theirs—a true reflex of their has. The British have ever acted up to their own philo. sophy, which, as Hobbes so well poinded out, classifies man among the beasts of prey, while ours places him but a degree, lower than the gods. , , For the rest, every nation has right on its side in exact proportion to its pow'or. Therefore by our might shall we acquire our right, and that right once gained, Germany will lose no time j in implanting on the world, to the possible exclusion of England's barren | soil, the goodly trees of German j thought, German culture, German ! ideals, leaving John Bull to stand j alone, deprived o* his colonies, isola- | ted and despised of all, en the white j cliffs of his pitiful little island. i LONDON UNDER "THE TERROR." I This is what the "Nachrichten" j says: As might have been expected from a Power with such a record as Britain, J she is now on the point of deserting j her bosom friend, so that she may l look after herself at home. The French, so far as she cares, may be eaten up alive by Germany; so long as the shopkeepers in England be left in peace to do their business. After the wretched fiasco of Antwerp, Britishers have lost their taste for Continental adventure There is at this moment but one predominant note in the British Press—the not of abject fear cf invasion. In the circumstances this is quite understandable, and the nrevalence of this sentiment aVso explains the great falling off in the number of recruits. They are beginning to feel at last, across the Channel, whore the shoe , really pinches. Conditions in London are such as to hold up to the ridicule of the world tl>e much-vaunted British power. The metropolis is nightly plunged in an Egyptian darkness.business places and pleasure resorts are open only for an hour or two daily, the assembling of groups of two or three friends in the street is forbidden, inoffensive Germans are pursued by the rabble and driven for succour and. safety into the arms of the police. In short, London life is paralysed because its citizens have at last realised that their rulers are Utterly incapable of defending their home? against the German invasion which is so threateningly near. In the fa»e of such a state of terror, i iKtchener's staring appeals for "mere i men" strike one as quite pathetic. < OCR MONSTROUS APPETITE. The appetite of the British soldier terms the subject of a grave indictment printed in the "Kofnische Zeittmg." Our forces, it seems, are eating the Fiench out of house and home, and the Fiench soldiers, unable to find a worse term of abuse, stigmatise them j as Germans! j The landing of the British troops, the journal declares, is nothing less than a disaster for the French. Every, thing that the departments of Seine Inferieure and Pas de Calais produce is being ruthlessly devoured by the British allies. Great cargoes of coffee, frozen meat, salt, and rice are seized by the British commissariat under the nose of the French officers, and the French troops, whose mouths water at the titbits which John Bull, with his monstrous appetite and monumental greed swallows with the ease of an elephant on the rampage. John Bull, as is his wont, is making capital out of the open-handedness of the French. He eats to depletion of the products of the French soil, and rubs his chest in smug contentment, not caring one iota about'tke hunger and misery which he is well aware is prevailing in all the French porta from Dunkirk to St. Malo. The French enthusiasm fo: the British, as may be imagined, is now a thing of the past. The feeling that is now inspired by these beefy gluttons, these bragging, voracious, swashbucklers, is one of constantly growing disgust and i aversion. Indeed, on several occasions j French soldiers have refuse:! to travel j in the same railway compartment with | the mercenaries from Albion because ! of their filthy habits and unclean ccn- ! diticn. ' Unable to hit upon a wor.l in their j own language to express in sufficiently strong terms their contempt for the ) British Tommies, the French soldiers now call them "Germans,'

BRITAIN THE- BLOODSUCKER. A choice bit from the "Morgenpost": We fail to see in whali Britain's boasted naval supremacy consists. This . overwhelmingly poweitul fleet has hitherto not made any serious attempt against us, while Germany, on the other hand, already gave evidence of her naval power at the mouth of the Thames within a few days after the declaration of war. Neither have the British distinguish, od themselves in any against Austria at !?ea. The fact is (hat Britain entered on the war solely and purely actuated by motives of spoliation. She cares no. thing for international. obligations. Her one desire is to enrich herself ar the price of the ruin of German commerce. Therefore it is to her interest to drag on the war as long as nossible, leaving others to pay the bill in blood and treasure. If we contemplate for a moment the figure which Albion presents before the nations ot the world we shall readily understand how it- was that Shakespeare drew with such brilliant mastery the character of Shylock. Britain is the Shylock, the blood-usurer among the nations. TNDIA WAITING ITS CHANCE. Tho "Frankfurter Zeitung," still unable to keep its fingers off the Indian troops. ,re-tells once again the story of that astonishing "conspiracy" which was originally invented in Berlin, and has since made the round of the whele German Press: We have obtained information from the most reliable sources that Uie bandylegged Gurkhas, the long-limbed Sikhs, and the swarthy Bengals, now being paraded by the British in France, with the object of encouraging the people of that country to further useless sacrifices, have entered - into a mutual blood compact to encourage their fellow Indians to come out in their hundreds of thousands, ostensibly to fight by the side of the British but. secretly, so that when the favourable moment comes they may fall or their tyrannical rulers in a body and out them up under the eyes of the enemy. That task accomplished, as it certainly will be, the next step W M °e to pass over to the German camp and make common cause with us against the falsehearted Britons, whom the Indians despise almost as deeply as we do ourselves. The moral effect of such an event will be overwhelming in India. It will strike the death-blow at British rule and open the eyes of the population both to their own capacities to rule themselves and to the real source of their future material and mora] suppert and well-being.