DUMB DRIVEN CATTLE

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 98, 25 April 1917, Page 7

DUMB DRIVEN CATTLE

THE GERMAN MIND

IMAGINARY EPISODES.

EXPERIENCES OF ANZACS.

British Headquarters, France,

14th February.

It is not easy to give a sure guide to those who want to know what they can

really believe as true in all the countries' stories from the war. About the

Germans, for example—l noticed, a paragraph headed "German treachery," telling how, when the Germans left their trenches and fled before one of the Aus-

tralian attacks in. the summer, they left behind a number of discs with spikes, so arranged that any of our men who touched one of them was immediately blown up by somes explosive which the thing contained (^rites the Commonwealth official correspondent).

Now that was simply a rather exaggerated description of the German disc bomb. It is a very touchy and rather delicate weapon, which I believe the

Germans have more or less abandoned,

possibly because it was too risky. It lias rarely done any damage to the. Australians, though- it was occasionally at one period found in, trenches which the Germans had left. But even if it had been left in millions with the object of blowing up-the Australian troops there is nothing that a soldier would complain about in this. It is nothing like as cunning or effective as a hundred devices which were left behind by ourselves at Anzac with the object of welcoming our friends tlie Turks. To call this sort of thing treachery is simply to weaken the overwhelming truths which humanity has against the Germans. There is a story that when General

Birdwood was visiting a hospital behind the Somme he came upon a man badly wounded. He asked how ,it happened, and the answer wasi "Well, mister, yer see, it was like this way. I got into a sort of shell-hole like in front of the trendies with a Lewis gun, and was sniping the Boches about 30 yards away as they came down a sap —and the cowardly blighters threw a bomb at me." Ido not believe the story for an instant, because, though an Australian soldier might think the Germans impertinent to stand up to him at -30 yards, ho would certainly not think them cowardly—they would be a "lot of coldfooted blanks" if they did not.

BAD, BUT NOT AS BAD AS

PAINTED

.That is one sort of story which wantsto be carefully scrutinised—the atrocity which is not atrocious—because it is apt to weaken the case against those atrocities which are. And I should be very disturbed in .mind if anything that I have written were to encourage the' impression that the German is lacking in ruthlessness," and that he 'need not be treated with at arm's length. The Australian experience is that the Germans in the front line—the . Tieral run of soldiers and even many of the officers — do not display the brutality of nature attributed to them by those who have not met them before. But the' German in the front line is not more master of his actions than a steel pin in a'railway engine. He is kind exactly as long as the great frowning brain of Germany, sitting miles ■ behind the front, thinks it expedient to be kind; and if the brain thinks it more expedient to be brutal, the man in the front line has to bo as brutal as it is expedient for him to be. • The German 'soldier takes his orders from above as part of the unquestioned plan of existence. His wishes,, his moral, prejudices, his ideas of humanity or decency do not even strike him as relevant. _A louse has more independence of.spirit and character than the ordinary German private.