WHY? HOW LONG?

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXXI, 22 February 1916, Page 2

WHY? HOW LONG?

WHAT.THE MOTHERS WANT TO KNOW.

•'Precisely because the German armies are pusiiing out i:ar beyond the national frontier, the mothers of Germany must be asking themselves why ? and how long?" says the New lork Nation.

"The War Office must speak proudly of the nation's banner floating on ti.o Morawa and the Nile. The Imperialist imagination may take hre at me tnoagnt of the Eupnrates and the Ganges. But the peasant mother in the riarz Mountains, the workingman's wife in Berlin —what to her are G-alli-poii, Suez, India? "At "the beginning she may have found it more difficult than yon Hindenburg to understand that the only defensive for the Fatherland was a, strong offensive; yet she may have learned in time. But her imagination cannot carry her along on a defensive of the Fatherland which is conducted in the Lithuanian Marshes, in the Balkan Mountains, in the Arabian deserts. Where will it end? All that the mothers in the Harz and in Berlin feel is that their sons have died in Belgium, they have died in France ana Russia, they are now dying in Serbia, they will be dying in Egypt and arounu Bagdad, if all goes well. As the German armies push victoriously south and east, the German General Staff cannot content itself with citing victories. It is under the growing necessity of explaining jthe casualty lists. "To the mothers of the invaded lands, in Belgium, France, Russia, and Serbia,, the agonising doubt cannot present itself in such form. Because the native lartd is invaded, because the enemy is at the door, the necessity j of sacrifice presents itself as immediate. It must be the same with the men in the trenches. - ' ' THE WAITING GAME. "We call up a picture of 400 miles of ditchwork, from the North Sea to the Swiss borders, 2,000,000 Germans facing 2,500,000 Frenchmen, and we ask ourselves whether it is in the German burrows or in the French rabbit warrens that the greater weariness of war prevails. Berlin asserts that it is the enemy who is weakening. The i German troops are dug in on the i enemy's soil; they can play the waiting game best. j "But from what we knew of the nature of me-i, spiritual forces must be working the other wajj. | "The French soldier is planted in ; his own soil; he is guarding his home. jHe may be weary, but he can have no ' doubts as to the bitter need of it all. iTo the German invader, the need is more remote. Fighting on the enemy's soil is a stimulus when the battle moves forward swiftly, when victory is : in»sight. But to be stuck in a ditch on foreign soil, with no end in sight? "It does not need men of ■ special ! susceptibilities to feel the demoralisaJ tion of doubt under such conditions. To the simplest mind, after more than a year of deadlock, the question must occur. What am I doing here? 'For the invaded nations there is the spur of necessity. For the invader there is the . natural human revolt against a tedium of slaughter and suffering without the solace of victory."