GERMAN EFFICIENCY.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVIII, Issue 36, 10 February 1917, Page 13

GERMAN EFFICIENCY.

WHERE DOES IT COME IN? THE ALLIES' ACHIEVEMENT. Discussing German versus British efficiency in an interesting letter to the "New York Tribune," an English gentleman, well qualified to speak with authority on the subject, says: — When people talk to you again of German efficiency do ask where it comes in! Is it on the Marne, when a slight push from General Foch drove them flying for sixty miles, or at Ypres, where a little British army, assisted by Belgians on the Yser, and French at Dixmude, beat off, between October 15 and November 11, 1914, 600,000 of the real Prussian soldiers, most of whom are dead to-day? Was it at Verdun, where 200,000 French kept three times their number at bay for six months, and in six hours reconquered what the Germans took from February 25, 1916, to August 31, 1916? Or on the Somme, where the French and we in four months have captured over 800 of the strongest fortresses the world has ever seen? Or in Egypt, where thousands of wretched Turks were led to their doom? Or in Armenia, now entirely Russian, made so after the most wonderful winter campaign in history against the great Turkish infantry led by German officers? Or even in Russia, where, having advanced 200 miles, they were held up for months by Russians who often had not one rifle betweeif- three men, and who are now pushing them back? Or in German South West Africa? Or the Cameroons? Or German East Africa? Or in northern China? Or in the Pacific Isles, on which millions of development money had been lavished, and which were a perpetual threat to the United States occupation of the Philippines and even of Honolulu? On the sea, ■where a navy which cost £300,000,000 is lying idle in the Kiel Canal, and not one German ship flying a German flag, js to be seen above water on the wide ocean? Believe mc, all that is inefficiency, the inefficiency of the man who makes a beautiful machine, and cannot repair it when it runs down, because he lacks initiative and his training has never taught him how to deal with situations which he himself has not conceived or contrived. Little Belgium? Yes, for the moment. Little Serbia? Yes, with assistance of that double-faced traitor Ferdinand. But where else? Greece! Oh! Or was it in the poison gas and lachrymatory shells, which are. new returned to them ten to one? Do you suppose Germany could have transported' a million soldiers from the Dominions across the ocean home to train without losing a man? Or sent three to four mflKons of men with every ounce of their munitions and stores to France, and kept them supplied without losing one? Or improvised in two years an army which is now beating the beet German troops to flitters, and wbioh ie matte up of

clerks, barristers, solicitors, miners, carpenters, labourers, not one of whom had any conception of the business of war, the most difficult, the most complicated, and the most expensive of all businesses? Guns? Oure are bigger and better. Aeroplanes? Ours drive the Germans out of the sky. Zeppelins? Ask Robinson and Tempest and Brandon and Freeman and Sowrey, and poor Warneford, were he alive, what they think of these wretched baby killers. No, Germany has not the gift of dealing with a situation as and when it arises. She regulates everything by ridiculous rules and regulations which are not to bo broken, no matter hew the circumstances change. She digs fortresses that look impregnable, that ta-ke weeks and cost thousands of casualties to capture. But they are captured, and then you find hundreds of Germans in palatial dugouts, and half a dozen bombs (iung down the entrances kill the lot because they cannot get out, or a big high explosive shell falls on top and buries them all. Thousands and thousands of Germans lie buried alive in their dugouts on the Somme. Is that efficiency? I think many Americans are proFrench because of the wicked way in which France had war forced upon her. She had no option, and she was far more unprepared than we were. Indeed the only two units in Europe ready for war in August, 1914, were the British Navy and the German army, and the first was the readier of the two, as anyone who sailed to New York in that month of shock must know very well. At Charleroi thousands of French were fighting with no equipment but bayonet and rifle and ammunition belts, wearing the patent leather boots they had been wearing on the boulevards the month before. Almost the first order we executed for the French was 2,000,000 pairs of army boots, which were all delivered within six weeks from the outbreak of the war. Then, of course, America owes her independence mainly to the French Navy, which prevented aid reaching Cornwallis and Bourgoyne and forced Vorktown to surrender. And is it not to Paris where every good American hopes to go when he dies? . . . Mr. Wilson seems to be nobody's friend. The Germane hate him as proEtiglish, by which I understand they mean that he does not like inhumanity and contents himself with saying so, and ill-informed people here hate him because he and Mr. Lansing worry us with Notes, and the rest laugh because if his contentions were true he would deprive America of her great defence, the sea. For my part I think that it Wibon were satisfied that American public opinion demanded intervention he would at once intervene, especially as the Allies do not want armed support, but only a suppression of the trade in contraband to the Scandinavian countries, most of which gets to Germany."