GERMAN DERVISHES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 169, 23 December 1914, Page 3

GERMAN DERVISHES.

CAUSE OF THEIR FAILURE. WAR COMES TO A DEADLOCK. . Mr Ashmead.Bartlett, the Daily Tel«graph correspondent, has just returned from the line of battle in Belgium and .France, and in a lucid article sorts out the essential facts with regard to those - bloodstained battlefields. "In their hatred of the English, the >' Germans have fought more like DerI vishes than Europeans, throwing away t their lives and refusing either to give 1 or ask for quarter, he writes. Having 3 failed in the north, they have now ret aewed their efforts south of Dixmude, 2 on the Aisne, on the plains of the Marne, , j and in the Argonne. Nowhere have ) they gained any ground. j j "No army, however great in numbers j and however brave, can continue this : sort of thing indefinitely. If we read 11 the signs aright, the great German offen--1 sive has already spent its force, mid , the General Staff must soon prepare to . retire to the Mouse and the Rhine. t TO COVER THE RETIREMENT. i i "From time to time wo shall read of > counter-attacks against sections of our line, but these will only be made to • cover the general retirement. After the f great disaster on the Yser it is hardly conceivable that the German generals • will plan out another offensive with any hope of achieving a definite success. "It would appear as if the General : Staff had not begun to realise the utter futility of charging bullheaded up against positions which, even if captured, only disclose others equally formidable behind. These great, attempts to break through a section of the Allies' line I have been tried in every possible position, j They failed at the Marne; they were re- { pulsed on the Aisne; they met with no better success between Roye and Las. signy, and further north between Arras ■ and Albert. In the Argonne, the army of the Crown Prince lias been uniformly unsuccessful. TERRIBLE LOSSES. "The German efforts culminated lasi . week in the desperate attempt to pass the Yser against the French and Bel- ( gians, and to force the British positions ' around Ypres. We do not know the extent of the losses (luring this period, but we know that our own and those of our Allies have been very heavy; therefore, as the Germans have been attacking fclie wholp time, their losses must have been infiinitcly greater. "The retirement from Dixmude has enabled the French to go over the ground that the enemy crossed in their series of assaults on the trenches round that town. An officer, with whom I have spoken tells me that in the course of the whole war he lias never seen a battlefield on which the dead lay so thick. Ranks mid ranks of Germans lie just where they fell. "It is true that the Allies also suffered frightful losses, but then we have .unlimited reserves in course of formation, - and as the French have only to supply twenty-three corps as compared with the J German s fifty.four, the material for a . long time will continue to be of the fl quality as that of which the corps were originally composed. Of late, the Russians have won pronounced success in Poland, Germans admit defeat, and I are in full retreat to their own frontiers. Under these circumstances it would appear an act of mad follv almost amounting to suicide for the German comma r ers to linger a moment longer than is » necessary on French soil. J3 "AN UNBROKEN FRONT." "In this campaign both armies seem possessed with the fetish of keeping an . unbroken front facing the enemy stTetcli- J ing for 300 miles. Every attempt of one commander to outllank the other has i: been met with a corresponding cxten- - sion to keep the line intact. The net result is that we have the Germans and , Allies so extended that up to the present neither side has been able to make a sufficient concentration to break [ through at any point. The war seems thus to have come to a deadlock, and might remain so indefinitely but for the pressure of the Russians on Germany s eastern frontier. WHY THEY FAILED. "The German commanders are probably now wondering why all their offensive movements have failed, in spite of the fact, that they have thrown lives away with a recklessness that Napoleon never equalled in his palmiest days. The results, compared with the losses, are n>_ '.The enemy's failure seems to be due primarily to "an entire, misconception of the character of modern warfare, and, secondly, to the arrogance of the German military party, who could not believe that any troops could long withstand shock tactics designed to achieve a definite result within a. given time, no matter what the cost of life, "Whereas the French General Stall ' made a most careful study of the lessons ' of the Russo-Japanese War, and have based their tactics oil the objective lessons of that campaign, the Germans seem to have totally ignored those lessons, or to have regarded the RussoJapanese War as a struggle which would throw no light on what would happen in Europe. "The Russo-Japanese War taught one great lesson —namely, that modern armies of more or less equal strength may »o on fighting indefinitely without either being aiile to gain the crushing victories which decided campaigns up to the Fran-co-German war. That war also fauglit tl„. lessen that the losses of the attackers were out of all proportion to those f j!.,, ,|.-fei!il.'r«, eml that, even if ground is «ained, the result is immediately neutralised bv the extreme exhaustion of the . vict-ers, which preludes all hope of fol- ' lowing up a temporary or local success. ; j i ATTEMPTING TTIF. TMPnFNTBU-.. . I "111 the face of these farts, the Germans. fully believing in tlfir own invincibility. have over and over again attempted the impossible, and every time tin-v have tailed. They have, ill fact, phii'ed into the hands of the Allies over since von Kluck turned southt-east toi wards the Marne, instead of marching on r 1 1'..,:.;. Genera! .Toll're's Fabian tactics ! although very difficult to understand at first, as they were so much opposed to the well-known character of the French troops, have since been amply justified by results. "The slow wearing-down form of war- '• fare has proved fatal to German ambi- • tions, because the situation in the East rendered, rapid success in the West absolutely essential. Tile flower of the Ger- , man iArmy lias been wiped out in the course of the first throe months of the war, and the material with which these ,j losses are now being replaced is very j, poor when compared with the trained veterans who swept in an irresistible flood from Liege to tlie Marne."