WHY THE GERMANS HAVE FAILED

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 110, 12 January 1915, Page 3

WHY THE GERMANS HAVE FAILED

" YOUR INFANTRY AND THE FRENCH GUNS WILL FINISH US." Mr Ashmead-Bartlett, the Daily Telegraph correspondent, has just returned from the line of battle in Belgium and France, and in a lucid article sorts out the essential facts with regard to those bloodstained fields. "In their hatred of the English the Germans have fought more like Dervishes than Europeans, throwing away their lives and refusing either to give or ask for quarter, "he writes." Having failed in the north, they have now renewed their efforts south of Dixmu.de> on the Aisne, ia the plains of the Marne, and in the Argonne. Nowhere have they gained any ground. TO COVER THE RETIREMENT. "From time to time we shall read cf counter attacks against sections of our line, but these will only be made to cover the. general retirement. After the pi eat, disaster on the Yseril is hardly conceivable that the German generals will plan out another offensive with any hope of achieving a definite success. "It would appear as if the General Staff have not yet begun to realise the utter futility of charging bull-headed up against positions which, even if captur- ' ed, only disclose others equally formid- I able behind. These great attempts to j break through a section of the Allies' line have been tried in every possible j position. They failed at the Marne; I They were repulsed on the Aisne; they met with no better gu'ccww bejfcweei | Roye and Lassigny, and further north j between Arras and Albert. In the Ar- j gonne the army of the Crown Prince ha* been uniformly unsuccessful. TERRIBLE LOSSES. j "The German efforts culminated last ! week in the desperate attempt to pass j the Yser against the French and R. gians, and to force the British positions , round Ypres, We do not know ttie e.v tent of the losses during this period, but we know that our own and those of | our allies have been very heavy; therefore, as the Germans have been attacking the whole time, their losses must have been infinitely greater. "The retirement from Dixmude has enabled the French to go over the ground which the enemy crossed in their series of assaults on the trenches round that town. An officer with whom I have spoken tells me that in tin course of the whole war he has never seen'a battlefield on which the dead lay j so thick. Ranks and ranks of Germans lie just where they fell. "It is true that the Allies have also suffered frightful losses, but then we have unlimited reserves im course of formation, and as the French have only to supply twenty three corps as compared with the German fifty-four, the material for a long time to come will continue to be of the same quality as that of which the corps were originally composed. Of late the Russians have won pronounced success in Poland. The Germans admit defeat, and are in full retreat, to their own frontiers. Under these circumstances it would appear an act of mad folly almost amounting to suicide for the German commanders to linger a moment longer than is necessary on Frericfc emX, "AN UNBROKEN FRONT." "In this campaign both armies seem possessed with the fetish of keeping an unbroken front facing the enemy stretching for three hundred miles. Every attempt of one commander to outflank the other has been met with a corresponding extension to keep the line intact. The net result is that we have the Germans and the Allies* so extended that up to the present neither side hag been able to make a sufficient concentration to break through at any point. The war seems thus to have come to a deadlock, and might remain so indefinitely but for the pressure of the Russians on Germany's eastern frontier. WHY THEY FAILED. "The German commanders are probably now wondering why all their offensive movements have failed, in spite of the fact that they have thrown away lives with a recklessness that Napoleon never equalled in his palmiest days. The results, compared with the losses, are nil. The enemy's failure seems to be due primarily to an entire misconception of the character of modern warfare, and, secondly, to the arrogance of the German military party, who could not believe that any troops could long withstand shock tactics designed to achieve a definite result within a given time, no matter what the cost of life. .. "Whereas the French General Staff made a.most careful study of the lessons of the Russo-Japanoso War, and have based their tactics on the objective lessons of that campaign, the Germans seem to have totally ignored those lessons, or to have regarded the RussoJapanese War as a struggle which could throw no light on what would happen in Europe. "The Russo-Japanese war taught one great lesson —namely, that modern armies of more or less equal strength may go on fighting indefinitely without either being able to gain the crushing victories which decided campaigns up to the period of the Franco-German war. That war also taught the lesson that the losses of the attackers are out of all proportion to those of the defenders, and that, even if ground is gained, the result is immediately neutralised by the extreme exhaustion of. the victors,

which precludes all hope of following up a temporary or local success. ATTEMPTING ..HE IMPOSSIBLE. "In the face of-these facts the Germans, fully believing in their, own. it vincibility, have *ver and again attempted the impossible, and every time (hoy have failed. They have, in fact, played into the .hands of the Allies ever since von Kluck turned south-east towards (he Marne, instead of marching or, Paris. General Joffre's Fabian taeties, although very difficult to understand at first, as they were so much opposed to the well-known character of French troops, have since been amply justified by results. "The slow, wearing-down form of warfare has proved fatal to German ambitions, because the situation in the East rendered rapid success in the West, absolutely essential. The flower of the German Army has been wiped out in the course of the .first.-three months of the war, and the material with which these looses are now being replaced is very poor when compared with the trained veterans who swept in an irresistible flood from Liege to the Marne.'' EVERY REASON TO BE SATISFIED. "Mr W. Maxwell, another experienced correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, says:— "Those who take a geographical view of the operations may see little cause for rejoicing over the work of the last month'. Their little flags have been, almost stationary on the war maps. Yet there is every reason to be satisfied. We have more than held our own against what may be called, without much exaggeration, a forlorn hope of the enemy, who has been making a supreme effort to bring the war home to the inhabitants of the United Kingdom." Air Maxwell also tells this story:— "Among the wounded was a German officer who travelled with me from Ostend on the eve of the war, I shall always remember our talk in the train. He was leaving his wife—an Englishwoman—and two children in London, and going to see his mother and sisters, who lived in Brussels before joining his battery at Mulhausen. War had not then been declared, but he had received his marching orders, and there were tears, in Mb voice when he spoke of the prospect before him. To meet him again, and in such circumstances, was one of those strange coincidences that make us' believe in fate. His woundß were too serious to permit any conversation. He was just able to give me a message for his wife and to say one sentence: "Your infantry and the French guns will finish us."