Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1935. GERMAN CONSCRIPTION.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 56, Issue 18, 2 November 1935, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1935. GERMAN CONSCRIPTION.

The operation of conscription, as from yesterday, now places the German army at a strength of 400,000 and it is expected that the annual drafts of recruits will total 450,000. The formation of the army on its present basis is in accordance with the decision to rearm, announced last March, the objective being half a million men. The will to secure equality in arms —to shake off the stigma of a country of “inferior rights”—can be understood, no matter how unpalatable it may be to the victors of the war. But there is grave doubt throughout Europe, and the world for that matter, about the bona fides of Germany’s claim for equality and no more. Germany wants more than the means of protecting herself against the arms of a militant neighbour or a European confederacy. She wants to recover her colonial possessions. Oppressed territories,” said Hitler in his book, “are not restored to the bosom of the mother country by flaming protest, but by a sword that is able to strike. To forge this sword is the task of the leaders of domestic policy; to secure that it be forged undisturbed and to seek comrades in arms is the task of foreign policy.” Although Professor Banse, who wrote “Germany, Prepare for War, was officially discredited when taken to task by observers in Britain, his work supplies a background for Nazi philosophy, a philosophy which still regards war as a legitimate instrument of statesmanship, as an ennobling thing. The fact that the author still held the governmentally-installed chair of military science at Brunswick after his book had excited the resentment of Britain and other countries indicates that the gospel of the sword is not to be suppressed. The sword, he says, “will come into its own again, and the pen, after 14 years of exaggerated prestige, will be put in its place. . . • The pen is good and the sword is good. But the sword is the older weapon and it is the final, the ultimately decisive one.” Banse affirms that Germany is on the threshold of an iron age, that the mission of the Ihird Reich is to free the country from all chains. No less than the uniting of all German-speaking people of Central Europe, spiritually and territorially, is the aim. His theme is the significance of territory and industry and communcations and national psychology for war and the conduc of war, and up to a point for the art of statesmanship. No profit can come from beating about the bush, lhe rearming of Germany » an established fact, at its very best indicative of the spirit that, despite pacts and leagues, still animates the nations of the world. Britain’s continued efforts to bring about reduction of arms are prompted by an attitude that can justifiably be regarded with pride of everyone of the King’s subjects, but that laudable striving after peace must not be allowed to place the Empire at the mercy of any possible aggressor. Nor, as has been emphasised recently, should it be allowed to so weaken Britain that her influence in world affairs be diminished.