GERMANY UNMASKED.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 December 1917, Page 7

GERMANY UNMASKED.

TEN MILLION DEAD. In "tlie concluding chapter of his book, Mr. Gerard writes: — When I returned to America after living for two and a half years in the centre of tl'ds world calamity, .everything ,seemed petty and small. I whs surprised that people could still seek little advantages, still be actuated by little jealousies and revenges. Freed from the lound of daily work, I felt for the first time tho utter horror and uselessness of all the misery these Prussian military autocrats had brought" upon the world, and what a reckoning there will be in Germany some day when tho plain people realise the truth; when they learn what base motive actuated their rulers in condemning a whole generation of the earth to war and death! \

[ Is it not a shame that the world I should have been so disturbed; that peaceful men are compelled to lie out in the mud and filth in the depth of raw winter, shot at aiul stormed at and shelled, waiting for a chance to murder some other inoffensive fellow-creature V Why must the people in old Poland die of hunger, not finding dogs enougl) to eat in "the "streets of' Lomberg?

The long lines of broken peasants in Servia and in Ttouniania; the population of Belgium and Northern France torn from their homes to work as slaves for the Germans; tho poor prisoners, of war starving in their huts or working in factories and mines. the cries of the old ar.d the children wounded by bombs from Zeppelins; the wails of the mothers for their sons; the very rustling of (he air as ■the souls of the ton million dead sweep to another world —why must all these horrors come upon n fair green earth where are believed that love and help and friendship, gen ius and science once ruled? The very bodies of those len million killed, if placed <;iid to end in two lines would reach from New Yor'< to San Francisco. Think of travelline this distance between u double line of staring corpses. It is because in the dark, cold, northerr plains if Germany these exists an autocracy, deceiving a great people, poisoning their minds from one generation to another, and preaching the necessity and ■virtue of war. And until that autocracy is either wiped out or made powerless there can he no peace on earth.