The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE MONDAY, JULY 15, 1918. “HINDENBURG IS DEAD.”

Taihape Daily Times, 15 July 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

MONDAY, JULY 15, 1918. “HINDENBURG IS DEAD.”

(With which is Incorporated The Tedhape Post and WaXnwulao News)..

“Hindenburg is dead,” is the worcing of a brief cablegram received at this office on Sunday evening. The soldier in whom all Germany placed its confidence for winning final victory is no more. What the effect of Ms death will be on the German people and the German armies cannot well be estimated or imagined/ but it must be very great and very widespread, lor if buy man has ever reached that degree amongst the so-called supermen of Germany when he was regarded as a demigod, it was Hindenburg; he was one of the uffra-ruthless school of which Bernhardi and Treitschke are the voice. Hindenburg was not, however, a preacher of the Prussian .scheme of murder and destruction, he was rather the architect and builder of it; he exhibited a wonderful ability for detail in planning and a merciless, inhuman inventive genius in the use of frightfulness, such as the world hitherto had no knowledge, in terrorising those he had conquered into absolute submission; he allowed nothing hellish, human or divine to stand between him and the coveted world supremacy, the dream of which had be. come a religion in all Germany. After a life devoted to tbe destroying of life his life has gone from him, and he has given in his last breath, knowing that the object for which the sword of Germany has been sharpened for many decades can never be attained. Ho died having on his soul fire bitter knowledge of certain defeat, and it is not unlikely that his death was accelerated, not unwillingly, by thoughts of what Germany would be when the last gun had been fired and of how he and h;s inhuman patrons of ruthlessness, frightfulness and hlood-lust would stink in the world’s nostrils into a far future. He saw a future Germany the amithesis ofiwhat he, as a servile supporter of the Hohenzollerns, had been scheming and fighting for; a Germany under the heel of those he would have conquered and enslaved, and he, in utmost probability succumbed a brokenspirited man. That he had some cleverness as an organiser and as a battlefield architect few will deny; most people will realise that it was his great gifts in this respect to which his notorious victories may be attributed. When war was forced upon the worlo Hindenburg had become a back German number, but we prefer to think that was because he was not a talker as well as a soldier. He was posscssed of an intimate knowledge of the marsh,lands of East Prussia, as well as of the whole eastern frontier, but particularly of that between Poland and the Baltic, and it was when Ger. man armies were unable to stand against the “steam-roller” of Russia, and when Russians could not be held back from invading Eastern Prussia that Hindenburg was called from obscanty and placed in command of the whole Eastern campaign. Ludendorff, a soldier possessing fTTose qualities which Hindenburg lacked, was selected as his chief of staff, and from that time commences the downfall of Russia. which culminated in the abdica. tion of the Czar, and the bloody revoIntion under the Bolshevik regime. Hindenburg lived long enough to experience the deepest chagrin and distress of realising that the Russia he had conquered wffiT again rising to fully avenge itself, and that German armies were no longer feared, even by the men they had held in subjection; that Germany could not now withstand the pressure that a reconstituted ring of steel would bring to bear, and he breathed his last, wifH th® 1

vision of the utter defeat of the plans he had laboured and fought so hard to make successful; a disappolntec, broken-spirited man. It will be notca that Hindenburg’s success was mostly against the Russians, and that on other battlefields he achieved nothing 9 to warrant the German people continuing the idea that he was a warrior demi-god. His prestige was rapidly declining when it was reported that he was ill some months ago, and the frequent mention of Ludendorff’s name ■indicated that it was to his shoulders the Kaiser had transferred the Hindenburg mantle. Latterly very little indeed has been heard about the conqueror of Russia, and there is a suspicion that his actual death took place some time ago. It may be regarded as certain that a great change in Germany had taken place, politically and militarily, when Kuhlmann announced in the Reichstag that victory was impossible on the battlefield. Kuhlmann realised that when it became generally known that the idol of the people was dead; that the man, the general, the warrior whom all Germans regarded as the saviour of their country was lying beneath the sod a great revulsion of feeling against the military caste and further prosecution of the war would result.. He had in mind the huge wooden image of Hindenburg standing in Berlin, the Mecca to which all faithful Germans hied to drive in their nails, renew their vows for final victory, and again give homage to the Hohenzollerns; he saw the people with their confidence shaken and their spirit gone looking with mixed feelings upon the monstrous image of their dead idol who in his lifetime had fallen far short of accomplishing what they had expected of him, and he realised that German confidence in final victory had been destroyed; that both army and populace were in favour of peace and. consequently, that it.would be in Germany’s best interests to seek peace while there was a prospect of saving something. Whether these surmises fairly or approximately represent facts we do not know, but we do know that they are extremely probable. There can be no doubt whatever about Hindenburg’s death having a demoralising effect upon the German armies as well as upon the German people, and it was an involuntary feeling to this effect last night that made obvious a wave of feeling that the end of the war had thereby beer? brought nearer.