“WE HAVE LOST THE WAR.”

Taihape Daily Times, 3 February 1919, Page 6

“WE HAVE LOST THE WAR.”

In the “Frankfort Gazette” of November 19 there is a remarkable and lachrymose greeting to the home-com-ing and defeated Hun army. It says;— “Our soldiers are coming back from the war. All roads from tno west are thickly filled with their columns. The Rhine railway bridges are choked with long trainloads of thdnr. • Covered with dirt and mud, tattered in their external appearance, their heads bowed in fatigue and flaming misery—thus they come back to us, our sons and brothers still two. three, or four million, in number. We cannot greet them with loud hurrahs or with flowers, whose glaring colours would only hurt their eyes and hearts. But we greet them nevertheless! We greet them with the waving banners of honour, with grave homegrown evergreen, and with a quiet, strong hand clasp which shall bid them welcome, and say to them how glad we are to have them home again,- and which, above all, expresses our thanks to them.

“We greet you, German soldiers! Germany has lost her war. But you have won yours. You have rescued Germany’s honour, and thus conferred upon our Fatherland the possibility of raising itself up and building anew. German soldiers! when one day you take your grandchildren on your knee and tell them all about this war, you need not be ashamed.” The doleful homily ends up on the note that all Germans— peasant, tradesmen, clerk, merchant, father, mother, everybody —are to blame, for the loss of the war because they too long placed their destinies blindly in the hands of “Kaiser, Chancellor, deputies, bureaucrats, and police.