VON KLUCK SPEAKS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XLII, Issue 9474, 6 March 1922, Page 3

VON KLUCK SPEAKS.

FIGHT FOR CHANNEL PORTS. WORLD’S FINEST ARMY STOOD IN WAY. Not long ago an officer with the British Army on the Rhine had occasion to pay a visit to the South of Germany, writes a special correspondent of the Children’s Newspaper.” One evening, as he sat in the hall of his hotel, a young German approached him, and said that a German general would very much like to speak to. him 11 if the Englishman had no objection. Instead of replying, “You may bring him to me,” the Englishman at once rose and crossed the hall to where the general was seated. The German general was the famous von Kluck. “I think you wore with the British Expeditionary Force,” said the general. “Yes, sir,” replied the English colonel. “I should like to tell you,” continued General von Kluck, “that-it was the British Expeditionary Force which exercised a decisive influence on the war. My intention was to go further west, and to seize the three Channel ports—Boulogne, Calais, Dieppe—and so put in peril the isolation of your island Empire. This intention was frustrated by the British Army “We had underrated it. We judszed it by quantity, not by quality. That little force, I should like to tell you, was the finest army for its size that the world has ever seen.” The man who paid this tribute to the army which defeated 'his plans was the enemy in whom the British Empire was most interested at the outset of the war, for he it was who conrolled the movements of the great army opposing our heroic little force. His was the right wing of the German host, and his mission was to sweep down the western limit of the battle area, roll up the Allied left wing, <™d envelop it or drive it back to Paris. There he was to outflank and enclose it, while the German centre moved straight on and the left swung in to the south-west, so that a double envelopment might be accomplished and the entire Allied forces defeated or captured. , If we wore surprised to find- von Kluck upon our front .at Mons with three, four, or fiye timfes our numbers, he was astonished to find us there at all! Belgians and French he had expected to meet, but this\ tremendous little force of hard-hitting Britons he had not counted among his opponents. Their desperate battles delayed his march so. that he began his pursuit too late, and, though he marched his men thirty miles a day, he never could fling his tentacles round our swift and deadlyj army. He saw the gates of Paris, and he saw the ports of the Pas de Calais open to his army, but before he could secure the ports or aim a blow at Paris he was ordered to wheel southwards and march past Paris. Reluctantly he did’so', and he was made to pay the penalty, foa* there emerged a taxi-cab army from Paris that assailed his right flank, and the forgotten British army—rested, re-armed and refitted—lept afresh at his throat, flung him back over the Marne and back over the Aisne, and then began an outflanking race with him to the North Sea coast: Von Kluck has written in his leisure that he -had the keys of victory in his hands, that the success which might have been attained by him was rendered impossible by the orders of the Higher Command, but we know now that finally he realises that the unheeded little British, army made him miss his destiny. We beat him back, and his plans collapsed in ruin.