EUROPE'S SURPRISE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 193, 4 January 1913, Page 1 (Supplement)

EUROPE'S SURPRISE

WAR CORHESPOXDEXTS' ECLIPSE. London, Xovember S. The aiuazin<» igwjrawe of tin- chancellories of Europe and of the press of Great Britain ami the Continent is eniby the war in the Balkan States. At the outset the Foreign Ministers of every country and the press of every capital—ollieial and unoflicial — combined ill expressing regret that the Balkan States had been so 'hopelessly milled as to tackle Turkey. They regarded them as Lilliputians attempting to conquer a (iulliver. The gradual dishas been aniii-int;.

-At lirst t'lic 1 urki-li armies wen* skilled in arms, trained in tac-tiis. led by in;i>t<■ r 111 illll-> iu modern warfare. armed with .magnificent a rli.llor.v. furnisihed with splendid cavalry. Nothing but sympathy was fell, t'ui' the poor people ot the Ha I kail*, who were to be swept nil the lace of the earth like Sennacherib* army. I.lie papers were full of the stories of the pluck of the Turks, of the prowess of their generals, or the war wizardry of the Sultan's palace.

CEII.MANY SOliliV FOR Till-; U.VLKAX STATES. (iermauy. ot course, led the way. She had trained Muhmiid Muklitaz I'aslia. (In 1 leader of the Turkish hosts. He. was one of Marshal Von der (Joltz's brightest pupils; lie hud the advantage of several years/' training at the Jjerlin War Academy. He, was attached to the general stall'; he actually saw active service with the 2nd Foot (luavds. He was regarded in (Jermaii .military circles as an extraordinarily capable commander. The defences of the Turkish, fortresses wore the personal creation of .Marshal (Joltz, and they were lilted with Krupp nuns. With such a combination of Herman tactics, (German training and (ierman jruns. (lermany felt positively sorry for the linlgars and Servian-* who wen' rushing to their doom. France, who 'had supplied the nuns for the Unitarians and Servian armies. »aid nothing when hostilities began. #ermaily tilled all Europe with her

boastings. France was dumb. Germany now is stricken with silence cauterised with chagrin, 'anil wholly dismayed', while Franco is indulging in a <p;iean of triumph, which is, of course, in Jio way 'affected by memories of Alsace and Lorraine.

To-day the papers, and with them the chant-cileries, are stating that the Bulgarians and Servians ami Greeks and .Montenegrins are fine soldiers, that they are sprung from the loins of ages-old fig'lvting men, that they are as effective an instrument of war as any country with a greater civilisation ami a greater power of destruction'' C:\ll produce', The change has been almost as great as that of the "Moniteur," which, wihen Napoleon left Elba, said that the ''Corsica]! ogre had sneaked 'away from his pris'im," and! wheni he enteral Paris a few days later rapturously .prod-aimed that "his Majesty tllie Emperor Napoleon" had entered the city. Before this reaches you the tune may have changed again l .

THE CORRESPONDENTS. And what of the war correspondents? They are .passing through the Valley of Tribulation, and must be very close to Despair. They have been muzzled with an effectiveness unexampled in, history. Columns upon columns, one might almost say miles upon miles, of telegrams have been and are being printed by the .papers, but there is not one which has any description of any engagement first hand. The old hands like Bennett Burleigh and Maxwell are conspicuous by their absence. The new men are prominent by their frantic attempts to manufacture something out of nothing. Amongst them .all there is no G. vV. Stevens, 110 Stephen Crane, 110 Richard Harding Davis, and no Donald M.icdonald. Tt requires the .imagination of a Frenchman to throw any picturesque glamor over the few glimpses of the war which .have been vouchsafed to press representatives. What, perhaps, is most annoying t# al'l of the great dailies, which are spending tens of thousands to satisfy t.lw hunger of their readers, is that the poorest paper in Europe, one which cannot afford to send its own correspondents to the front, has beaten them all in its war news service. The Reichpost, published in Vienna, enjoys thi patronage of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and of the military circles in the Austrian capital. By influence it has obtained the services of a clever Austrian military attache with the Bulgarian army. Censorship, which is applied to pressmen, has not been enforced with hi.ni.. He has been able to send news hot from the field of battle,, and the whole of the rest 'of the press ol the world has had to draw .most of its reliable stories from his despatches. In military circles, and in some of the newspaper offices, it is being gravely discussed whether the day of the war correspondent is not ended. When a modern army engages in u battle,

stretched as it is at present over a front many miles in length, it is impossible for any one man to accurately record what happens. It is equally impossible to co-ordinate the impressions of half-a-dozen men. It begins to look as if war* of tJirt future will have to be curtailed to a mere record of actual engagements, of victories or defeats, of killed and wounded, leaving t'lie history of the campaign, with all its purple patches, to be written up when peace is proclaimed.

WIRELESS WARFARE. In the Balkans wireless is being used for the first time with remarkable success* Telephone and telegraph lines cam be cut down, but the, wireless waves no man can stay. This makes the difficulty of commanders in getting in touch with the various units of their forces less than Wellington, had at Waterloo, though his line was to be measured in yards instead of in miles.

Modern battle demands a totally different kind of courage to that which filled the fighting men of old. Then, a soldier met his enemy face to face. Now vast spaces separate them. The impersonality of modern war heightens its strain. The combatant is not a man but a bullet whistling invisibly through the air. Personal courage, personal strength, are of no value against this ,unseen, all-pervading danger. Already stories are. reaching London of the effect of the campaign upon the nerves of the men. "Mauseritis" is a very actual medical military disease.

L am told by a friend that when General Botha visited England after the South African war people were astonished at the peculiar expression on bis face. They expected a serene cheerfulness and a heroic calm; hut what they saw was a man whose face always bore an expression of nervous tension, whose whole nature .seemed to be continually on the watch.

. An officer who saw service in the Japanese war tells me that the saddest sight was not the men torn by shrapnel, but the unwounded men whose will power had evaporated, whose nerves were exhausted, soldiers who had readied the end of their brain strength and could go no further. "Wherever a bush was 1 , or a bole presented itself," he said, ••there cowered these fellows, and stared at lis apathetically.' History is repeating itself in the Balkans.