GERMANY'S MAN POWER.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 19, 24 January 1916, Page 7

GERMANY'S MAN POWER.

In recent article in the “Daily Mail” Mr. F. W. Wiiles gives the following interesting analysis of German man power, the vital question of the war: In the midst of a world of muddle, waste and procrastination, a new and highly efficacious cure for the blues Fas reached London.

It is strictly up to date and it is made in Germany, It consists of the 10,300 th page of officially acknowledged German casualties, and it denotes that the enemy’s losses in the field are certainly not below 3,700,000 in killed, wounded and prisoners, for the closely packed pages contain on the average 360 names each. Before me as I write lie lists Nos. 763 to 800 inclusive for the first twenty-two days of November. They contain a .total o f 195,480 names, or 8885 a day. A s the German military authorities, for reasons best known to themselves, do not publish their officer casualties

(except non-coms.), and the lists are necessarily incomplete, we may safely compute the enemy’s day-by-day attrition in Russia, France, Flanders, Turkey and Serbia 'at close on 10,000 every twenty-four hours. British military authorities, I believe, possess evidence that the German lists do not On' on the side of under-estimates. The estimate of German wastage as 10,000 i s not 'a figure manufactured from late lists in support of my theory that the Deutsche Verlustlisten are a capital panacea for November glooms. The tell-tale sheets—the exact size of a penny London evening paper, three closely-crammed columns to the page—have been accumulating on my desk since the hour the war began, and if I piled them perpendicularly they would long ago have formed a many-columned peristyle towering to the ceiling. In all the world’s history there has never been such a deathroll. If it is kept up to the mark for Imperial William’s cynosure, it must sicken even him at heart every time he contemplates the rivers of red ink which have been spilled in the recording cf it. It must nauseate him for less sentimental reasons besides, for the German General Staff knows that to have the Teutonic armies used up at the rate of 10,000 a day spells eventual and certain disaster. It means that German military strength can be vitally sapped), or “nibbled,” as Perc Joffre puts it, without throwing a single army on to German territory. Not that the Hun will be crushed while still in occupation of Belgium, part of France, Poland and Serbia. But that his power to maintain himself there, not to speak of advancing his lines or othenvise strengthening his hold, is being effectually and steadily diminished by remorseless decimation is palpably beyond all question. Even a nation several times Germany’s 68,000,000 cannot permanetly stand such a drain.