WAR NOTES.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 February 1916, Page 2

WAR NOTES.

, GERMAN TRICKS OF WAR. The trick of trying to make the enemy believe that there are traitors In their camp is a well-worn war ruse, at least 1.000 years old. But apparently certain of our contemporaries have never heard of it. Leo the Wise, Emneror of Byzantium, explained the dodge very 'fully about 900 A.D., in a work entitled "Tactica." He recommends "letting inteligencc ooze out that some important (enemy) person is secretly friendly." How it would have delighted the Emperor (as no doubt it docs anethcr Emperor to-day) to hear the foe observing portentously that the intelligence ''has not been contradicted!" Leo further advises "adding plausibility to the rumor by sparing the 'important person's' estates when raids are going on." Long before this Hannibal had tried the same plan against Fabius. It is curious to note how this cunning Byzantine monarch expresses the unscrupulous methods of Germany. "If," he writes, "negotiations with a neighbour are going on, and it is intended to break them off, the softest words should be reserved to the last day but one, and then a sudden expedition be launched against the enemy, who have been lulled into a belief in the certainty of peace." Before a battle Leo the Wise advocates cheering tip the troops by news of imaginary victories elsewhere. Requests by officers with white flags for a truce was used as a means of spying out the opponent's strength. But in one thing the mediaeval Emperor lags hopelessly behind Wilhelin the Second. "Taetica" lays it down emphatically (as quoted by Oman's "History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages") that "no female captive must bo mishandled, no slaughter of non-combat-ants allowed, no cruel or ignominious terms imposed on a brave enemy." Even Byzantium could not anticipate German "frightfulness."

HOW BRITAIN SAVED. FRANCE. Senator Berenger, in Paris-Midi (.December 22), says that France is now turning out of her arsenals and factories as many guns, shells, and other munitions as Germany, and more than England. "We are manufacturing shells of all calibres by hundreds of thousands per day, cannon and machine-guns by dozens, powders and explosives by hundreds of tons." But if the British record is not equal to the French, France none the less recognises her indebtedness to her "faithful and courageous Ally." "We can never put too highly the services England has rendered and is rendering. They are fundamental and incomparable. Without British ships, without the colossal fleet which has paralysed the colossal fleet of Germany, we should have enjoyed neither the. freedom of the seas nor the security of our coasts. "Without the hydrocarbures of England, without her benzine and toluene, we could not have manufactured our melinite and our other nitrate explosives. Wc would then have been strangled at the outset, and compelled to sue for peace after a few months of war. "Honor, then, to England, which has set herself, on land as an sea, to second and support us until the well-earned day of decisive victory."