GERMANY'S MAN-POWER.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 September 1917, Page 5

GERMANY'S MAN-POWER.

HOW SHE MANAGES. Germany's population at' its highest watermark never exceeded 68 millions, and has admittedly dwindled to 05 millions since 1914. By her own showing she has sustained four million casualties) twice in number tho strength of the armies with which she conquered France in IWO, and equal to the entire forces she was supposed capable of putting on the field three years ago. There is no use burking the fact, it is an extraordinary accomplishment with an aspect of uncanniness about it. showing m a flash the brutal grip military Germany has on the people and the fell mood which impels her to drive her talons even deeper into the yeilding flesh, Doubt has even been thrown on tho pre-war returns' of Gorman population : in other wortfs, that these returns have perjured themselves with an ulterior purpose in view. But the solution of the seeming enigiiw is unlikely to rest here. Tampering with population statistics, besides being a perilous ruse, which, if discovered, would be construed in sinister fashion by ether powers*, wj>uld necessitate too many public servants being let into the secret for it to remain inviolate.

The explanation of these never-ending streams of reserves point to Germany's combing-out processes being in the nature of a small tooth compared with the British curry comb. Driven by frantic need and a knowledge that the only alternative is capitulation, military Germany has squeezed the country of its, last ounce of fighting energy, filling the industrial gups thereby created with prisoners and deportees, with German women and purchased labor from neutral countries. Nothing on two legs or, indeed, one, ia passed through the German military mill as unserviceable -waste. Germans taken prisoners by us recently and thought at first to bo wojmded men were discovered to be cripples, many of them presumably since birth. It required little scrutiny to find in tho prisoners' cages men suffering from hernia of several years' standing, dwarfs, hunchbacks, men lacking fingers—aye, and men lacking arms. And what is perhaps even more significant, a proportion of the captives, though in good enough physical condition, were past their prime—men who had long sincn been released from the Landsturm, the last recognised defensive line in the Fatherland. Among the grey-beards were men who had sons fighting in tho Army they had left foreever behind —aye, and their sons' soils as well. Picked betauso of a suggestion of sturdiness from fortresses and lines of communication, they had been pitchforked to the front in defiance of the fact that their ages were on the shady side of 50.