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Evening Star, Issue 16032, 8 February 1916, Page 4

We may accept as a good augury tho fact

that tho German German "Horror" official and Press And campaign to fasten British " Savagery." upon the British 2*avy and nation charges of infamous brutality and cowardire has provoked no answering endorsement among neutral or friendly Powers. All the world knows that tho British are not built that way. Whatever dislike for British ways and methods fchero may bd among outsiders however much our insular .prejudices may offend, and many and regrettable as our mistakes havo been, and may ycb be—wo have certainly maintained an untarnished reputation as clean fighters. Our eeamen and joldiens—though how sanguinary and terrible the war would prove not even the highest among them had a definite ideahave borne themselves throughout as gentlemen and sportsmen. They intended to "pla.y the game," and both on land and sea they have more than onco played it to their own hurt. They havo risked their own lives to savo those of their beaten foes, and (in the early da}-® of the 'war, at any rate) they believed that, apart from its " why " and its " wherefore," their enemies would play it and go through with it as became honorable men. The awakening came slowly. Probably the men of the Xavy and tho Army, in B pite of their experiences, were the very last to realise that in very truth they were fightin-r against a nation whose conception of wtoand how to wage it was " of Cerberus and blackest midnight born." To them ,-< German was a soldier or a, seaman liko unto themselves, "of tho same souses, "affections, passions, fed with tho same" "food, hurt with the same weapons, snb"ject to the same diseases, healed by the " same means, warmed and cooled by tho "same winter and summer as a Christian "is." But the awakening did come. Sir John French, in, one of his despatches, referred to German ignorance of " fair play " in the conduct of the war. His protest merely called forth the retort from the 'Cologne Gazette' that "the German will •'always strive against the attempt to "measure the whole world from the point ,: of view of the sportsman and tho "non-sportsman ... the English will "have to accustom themselves to German " seriousness.'' What German seriousness, as distinct from British fair play, has meant on land and sea the world has long since learned. Germany has fought this war in the same spirit of calculated infamy with which she first sprang it upon Europe. Germans havo proved to the hilt the accuracy and justice of Wellington's judgment of them when they were our Allies, a century ago. "I can "assure you," he writes his mother, "that from the general of the Germans *' down to the smallest drum-boy in their "legion, the earth never groaned with L "such a set of murdering, iufamous

["villains. , . . They murdorod. rob"bed, and ill-treated the peasantry "wherever they went." And as on the land so on the sea j but with a difference. The Germans know nothing of tho sea, it* history, and its traditions. Not for them was the path of exploration and discovery. Their navy is but the accumulation in hot haste of many great and threatening battleships, that are as yet destitute of a single ennobling memory; a stupendous collection of destructive machines, that were to do on sea what " my victorious armies " were to, do, and have sinoe done, on land. It is this nation which to-day stands shamed and shameless before- an indignant and horrified world, \vitb. the shrieks of its myriad victims yet surging in our ears, that dares bring charges of cowardice, inhumanity, and savagery against British seamen. Because a scoundrel was publicly whipped in B-abaul during tho early days of the Australian New Guinea expedition; because some American muleteers have made affidavits that British sailors kicked and shot drowning Germans; and because tho captain of a British trawler, having nine unarmed men with him, would not attempt to take aboard over 20 armed Germans, fresh from their murderous onslaught on harmless women and children, there come yells and shrieks of execration, together with charges of cowardice and brutality, from tho authors, executors, and champions of Fright-fulness. The world will demand something more than tho mere word of Germany before it accepts so monstrous an accusation.