NORWAY KNOWS BETTER.

Taihape Daily Times, 19 November 1918, Page 5

NORWAY KNOWS BETTER.

GIVEN UP BY THE GERMANS AS A BAD JOB.

(By Herbert Vivian in the London Express.). Christiania. ' The Huns, I gather, have given up Norway as more or less of a bad job. During my whole stay in the country I have only once heard German spoken in the streets. A chambermaid told me she was tired of working in hotels and wanted a private place, but it was not easy for a German to obtain one in Norway. Afterwards, when she learned nay nationality, she pretended to be a Swede. The only evidence of Germany is German wine, and I have had arguments with compatriots about the propriety of drinking it.

Germany still has her propagandists in Norway, but they are sincere and unpaid—doctors, engineers, painters, and others who have studied in Germany and returned with a sense of gratitude for what they have learned there. They have been taught to despise English medicine and teaching, and they resent the inaccessibility of British universities to foreigners.

Booksellers have done much voluntary propaganda, though their windows are chiefly filled with cheap translations of second-rate English novelists. These translations also supply the serials of the leading newspapers, and it is fair to state that German attempts to capture the Press have proved an utter failure. G?ermanophile Norwegians have succeeded, however, in obtaining temporary posts as correspondents to English journals and continue to insinuate their views in a Christiania paper whose editor is on our side. Military correspondents also send garbled versions of events from the German front

The prevalence of German toys illustrates the way in which the Germans are continuing their industries in the hope of retaining markets after the war. This is proved by the fact that they are mostly tyar toys—guns, aeroplanes, submarines, etc. —obviously qf recent manufacture. A friend of mine" In Christiania told me of his' vain efforts to buy English toys for his little boys last Christmas; -The best he could find were -in boxes, with labels inscribed in English, “Made ,in Bavaria,” which had evidently . been prepared for the British markets before the war. I am told that Hun boats crawl along the coasts of Scandinavia', keeping safely in territorial waters, and carry home Norwegian seaweed.which is used for munitions, ;