The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1918 PEACE ONLY THROUGH DEFEAT.

Taihape Daily Times, 30 September 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1918 PEACE ONLY THROUGH DEFEAT.

(With which is Incorporated The Xaihape Poat and Walmaclruo News).

The first true note of peace has been struck in Bulgaria, and it has pealed out so sonorously that it is resounding in the ears of all Germany, Austria and Turkey. The panic of real fear has struck into the German heart and the financial thermometer and barometer in Berlin is indicating the chaotic fright with which the country has been seized. As Pan struck the Persians with a sudußii absorbing fright before Marathon, so has Foch struck panic and fear into the soul of an inhuman Germany. Austrian understanding of the Bulgarian reverberating peace note is shown in the sudden withdrawal of her armies from near the danger zone. The facts are, Bulgaria has appealed for an armistice, for a cessation of hostilities while her Finance Minister at the head of a peace mission interviews the Allied Commander-in-ChTef in the Balkans with the object of arranging a basis on which Bulgaria might cease to be a belligerent. Bulgaria now desires to reverse the foreign policy that lined her armies up with those "of cultur for the conquest of the world, and her Ministers seem prepared to accept whatever terms the Allies may ask. Britain has had the Bulgar proposals under consideration and has unhesitatingly said there be no 'armistice, but any overtures for peace will have the consideration their nature merits. Austria is seized with alarm and is already getting her Balkan army away into safer quarters. Panic in the Berlin Stock Exchange volubly indicates the degree of real fright with which political Germany has been suddenly struck. This is the peace position so far as we have been allowed to know it. The significance to be drawn will be in accordance with ■ our understanding of the true war situation. How is Bulgaria’s appeal for armistice and peace to be distinguished from those acts of subtlety and cunning for Which the enemy is notorious? By the effect it had upon the, Allied Commander in the Balkans; by the serious consideration given to it by Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law; by an affrighted Austria that is taking its armies away to escape the retribution that Serbs, Francs, Greeks and Italians would very soon have administered: by the panic in the Berlin Stock Exchange, showing that mortal dread which has seized the soul of German financiers, who see all that cultur went to war for is lost and that their, hitherto rich and prosperous county must emerge impecunious and industrially prostrate. The reverberations of the forcefully struck Bulgarian peace note leave us no room to doubt either its genuineness, its earnestness ,or its immediate necessity. Bulgaria was the last nation to join the Central Powers and is the

first to find it essential to withdraw; hut it is not this one fact alone that has filled Germany with fear and panic; last week-end cables stated that Foch was knocking the keystone out of the German arch of defence on the West front, and latest intellgenc® left no doubt about the ultimate complete success of his intentions, and that German hordes would have to commence quitting France at once,, and as best they could. With the plans of their defence on the West front shattered and their armies in retreat pursued by a strong enemy; with Austria retreating in the Balkans; with defeat of her troops in Russia; with the Servians driving them out of their country; with Turkish armies in Palestine being destroyed one after the other, like knocking down nine-pins, and lastly, with a British force invading Bulgaria, and not more than one week’s distance of Sofia, and the consequent Bulgarians’ appeal for peace with a reversal of foreign policy that alligned them against the friends of small nations, would it not be indeed surprising if the high military cultur of Germany was not in mortal dread, and seeking for ways to escape the just punishment its unprecedented barbarity, its unstinted wallowing in scientific and practical inhumanity, in all that is inexpressibly revolting to the human mind. As Foch is bringing down the keystone to German defence on the West front, so are Generals Desperey and Allenby knocking out the keystone of the German-Turkish-Bulgar-Tan Alliance. With the Bulgarian keystone gone the whole Central Alliance structure must come down. Squirm ana~twist and scheme as Germany may, world domination has vanished out of sight, never to return, and her military cult knows its doom Is sealed. German princes of commerce and industry quake for their future, for they realise the terribly degrading situation into which their wa r lords have led them; they know that their future depends upon a humanity they sought to overthrow and

they are convulsed and consumed with panic. But there are indications that the people of Germany have a degree of realisation that' they are about to be emancipated from oppression of a military thraldom. Bulgaria is already threatened with a bloody revolution and her rulers are eager to arraign themselves on the side of peace, freedom aria sane democracy. 'A Bulgarian peace ..brings freedom to Rumania; to throw off the oppression, cruelty, the insatiable inhuman greed of Prussian conquest. The Allies will undoubtedly insist upon an open road across Bulgaria to Rumania; in fact, it is impossible with a reversal of Bulgaria’s war policy to understand how Austria-Hungary can stand against the Balkan forces ’ that will be opposed to her. Turkey may fall out of the war any day, hut it is not practicable for Austria to continue with a front against her extending from Switzerland to the Black Sea. Austrians in Albania are in immediate danger and they are hurriedly being evacuated. The Central Powers urged to war four years ago by the Prussian military war lords are now defeated by their own admissions, and the first appeal for peace has come from Bulgaria that will very soon be the subject for emulation by Austria and Germany. The bitterness of the peace pill to Prussian militarists will be commensurate with the terrible ravages of the cancer with which they have inoculated the world. It is yet early to say so, hut there are now real grounds for hoping that this great scourge of war will have run its course with the end of the current year.