CRITICISM.

Taihape Daily Times, 11 January 1918, Page 6

CRITICISM.

THROUGH GERMAN EYES,

LONDON, November 3

Germaii writers spend much of their time in baiting the British Admiralty They claim, in Captain Pcrsius’s words, that “there is no failure in the British Fleet in keenness, energy, and willingness of officers and men to make sacrifices for their country but there is a great failure in shrinking of the Admiralty \from the responsibility of ordering risky actions.”

The British Fleet, they claim, is paralysed and inactive because of a rigid policy of sparing of men and material. What comfort they can get from such talk they can have. For they are having trouble enough to explain their own failures. The capture of Riga and the Baßltic Islands and the Italian debacle, have been badly needed windfalls in Germany.

No one can dispute their military and political significance. They are hard blows against our weakest Alies But they have saved the Kaiser’s military and political advisers from serious trouble with the German populace is undoubted. Even with the flags and salutes of victory stimulating the German nation, the Kaiser had a long hunt before he secured another Chancellor.

And at the end of the chase, in wjhich }the (Reichstag senhi-democratic leaders were all the time well to the fore, he could only produce a weak Bavarian professor, a theorist and reactionary —a nonentity to succeed a nonentity. There is a general idea already throughout the German press that Count Hertling will not he that Germans crave. He is a stop-gap, hut in because the Kaiser has a bitter enmity against, the real leader of the pan-Germans, Prince von Bulow, and has a terror of the rem lenders of the Reichstag’s pro-peace majority.

The Kaiser would fain join his forces with the Reichstag’s leaders, and advocates their peace resolution, which is based upon the Idea that a semivictorious German peapc' £.ould be negotiated. He would thereby secure his throne. But he would lose the Conservatives and the Army leaders, and would do much to make the Crown Prince a serious rival again. Meanwhile, the most serious crisis that has yet confronted the enemies of Prussianism has come upon us. Even the Reichstag pro-peace advocates are not opposed to a completely victorious peace And so they come into line ■with the Crown Prince’s party for a time again, whilst shrewd German agents sound the possibilities in Russia and Italy