MUSCLE-MAKING

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 November 1920, Page 8

MUSCLE-MAKING

GERMAIN«' NEW I"AD. The Berlin correspondent of the London ''li.iiu.-s" descnuea wual lie calls "a new Uewiiuii industry" in a dispatch to Ins paper, lie says . •'vJ'u Sunday I walked lor .some twenty kilometres through Inc country districts between Hanau and Frankfort and saw for in} sell' the muscle making industry to which young Germany is devoting ail its spare tune. "1 passed thousands of young Germans of both sexes marching along the roads in military order, mostly in bauds of forty to eighty men and women. All carried knapsacks, and in nearly, every ease three or four had musical instruments (mostly Tyrolean guitars). The usual plan is for these bands to leave the cities and towns on Saturday afternoon and evening and camp out for the night. Some cany small .canvas tents, something like an American army 'pup tent,' but most sleep in the open air.

"Both men and women are loosely dressed, the men without coats as a rule, and the women with open bodices and no corsets. They present a fine healthy appearance, and although the heavy marching will not make the women beautiful, it will improve rather than interfere with their breeding capacities—which is what the Germans seem really to be after. Germany seems to be determined to replace the men she lost as quckly as possible, and every German village is literally swarming with little machine-gunners.

"These great marching and musclemaking movements, in which young people of both sexes march together and pass the night together in the fields, will greatly inrease the baby crop. German vital statistics before the war were notoriously incomplete, and it would not be surprising if a notable percentage of illegitimate births were passed over in silence in the future. The youth of Germany is now being taught that physical strength is the thing most to be admired in man, and child-bearing in woman.

"The explanation generally given for these outings, that they are the result of purely economic causes, does not satisfy me. When a German says that the young people cannot afford the pleasures of the cities, that the only reason they march is because they cannot pay fourth-class train fares and that there is no other way in which they can obtain an outing, I am sceptical. Germans were always fond of 'vereins' of all kinds, and before the war Lhave seen marching clubs and tourist organisations on the road ; but nothing like what I saw on Sunday. "This is now almost a national movement. It is the youth of a nation training hard to make muscle, to breed a new, strong and numerous generation—whether for rebuilding or for revenge I do not know."