AN HISTORICAL URGE

Hawera Star, Volume L, 21 August 1930, Page 6

AN HISTORICAL URGE

WAR AND TEUTONIC TRIBES,

An eminent French historian declares that war cannot so easily bo eradicated because to the Teutonic tribes of Europe, whom he believes to be barbarians yet, the urge to invade France and reach the shores of the Mediterranean has become a sort of instinct. It sounds rather ridiculous, and yet there may bo some truth in this assertion. Travelling through Eastern Europe some time ago and contemplating' the omlless flat and crushing monotony of brown soil and melancholy sky, we felt something of the terrible satiation and the revolt that this unchanging scenery must have produced in the ancestors of the peoples that dwell there. It is quite conceivable that at certain moments in history the primitive tribes were incapable of supporting the imprisonment of their vision, so that they trampled down the .frontier barriers that the Romans had put up and came out smashing everything in their way, like men half-asphvxiated. until they came to rolling hills and took contact with verdant valleys. And then there were the shores of the Mediterranean, that opened to them an empire of almost narcotic-like bliss. There is no doubt that the Alarics and the Gen,scries and Otlios always pushed for Gaul and Lombardy, as if driven by some intuitive urge. Yet there is another reason, also. The (South was rich and the Nordics were eager for loot and brown-eyed women.