IS HOLLAND COMING IN?

Taranaki Daily News, 24 September 1915, Page 6

IS HOLLAND COMING IN?

A MESS AG V. The C'i.iUu'hurch Evening News'"'on Saturday last stated: — We published a month or two ago the story of a Christchurch man whose son was in a position to know something of tiie movements of, at any rate, a section of Kitchener's armies. It was mutually arranged that when Kitchener's men began to cross the Continent, he should send a certain cablegram regarding his mother's health. That cablegram was duly sent, and there is reason to believe that tlmt inference was correct.' When Major de Martinos, now with the famous Belgian Guides Corps, was in Christchurch, he received letters from highlyplaced friends in Holland, who were firm in the faith that a way would he found for British forces through Dutch territory, in spite of the German Prince Consort and the German affiliations of Queen Wilhelmina. While Holland knew that premature entrance to the war would mean her being swept over as Belgium was, she also knew that her coming in at the crucial moment would bo a most important factor in the Allied strategy, and it must have become clear to her that a victorious Germany spelt disaster for the smaller States — especially for that State which controlled the estuary of the Scheldt and the mouth of the Rhine, both of'which it has been plainly stated by German authorities were essential to Germany. Further, there has been a belief -among military men that Holland would "come in" before the end, and disposition to interpret the Allies' holding tactics in the West is in part due to this; the desirability, from the western point of view, of having as great a German force as possible entangled in the elusive chase after the Russian armies; and the urgency of forcing the Dardanelles. Meantime Holland has been training and exercising her armies, giving general hospitality to a great part of the Belgian people and looking after interned British soldiers and sailors and Belgian soldiers, chiefly those who had to cross the border after Antwerp. Our cables have been telling of a feeling thai great events arc shortly to transpire in the West. The one great possibility of ending the deadlock there effectively and hurling the Germans back towards the Rhine, instead of merely to another set of trendies a little behind their present ones, is a flanking movement. No such movement is practicable except through Holland, where the seas would be open for supplies and the landing would be (were the Dutch in) on a friendly shore. Moreover, it would command the shortest road to Berlin, and make the further occupation of Belgium so dangerous that the Germans would probably have to scuttle out of it or the greater part of it, and to do this under pressure of the combined Belgian, British and French armies along its present front, Tt is the one possibility of great and decisive disaster to the Germans in the West, a possibilty which a similar movement at the other end of the line, through 'Switzerland, did the Swiss consent, would not present. All this by way of preamble to another little story, which we again give for what our readers may consider It worth, hilt which is vouched for to us by a respectable and well-known Christchurch citizen. There is in Christchurch at present a gentleman who has a son hi Holland in a position to get information. He has also been convinced that sooner or later Holland would come in. Before leaving for New Zealand he arranged with his son a private code ostensibly about butter, but really covering the situation in Holland in regard to war. If Holland was finally coming' in he was to send a certain cable. That cable has arrived. It reads; "Butter rising/'