HERR NOSKE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue LXXIV, 29 August 1919, Page 5

HERR NOSKE.

LATEST GERMAN STRONG MAN

The most difficult person to interview in Germany to-day is Gustav IVoske, the surprising Socialist Minister of Defence, and the only strong man produced by the revolution, recently stated Wythe Williams in the London Daily Mail. It is only Noske who has held the government together, so that it could at least go through the form of sending the BrockdorfE-Bantzau delegation to Versailles.

Even Noske is willing to talk. The trouble is getting into the street in which he lives. It is necessary to have a permit or an official escort to pass1 the guards. This was finally arranged for me by the ever-obliging Bernstorff, late of Washington. At the time of my request Noske was at Libau, and upon his return he was occupied m getting troops off to the relief of Munich, but even so an aide-de-camp called for me one afternoon, and we started for Bendlerstrasse, a short street off the Tiergarten Park, where the destinies of the new German Army are now controlled. Barbed wire barricades were at both ends of the street, formerly a fashionable West End thoroughfare. All the way along to the Ministerial mansion armed, helmeted guards were stationed every few yards. Hand grenades dangled at their belts. There also were machine guns at strategic points. The office of Noske was on the third floor of the house, to which I ascended through a cordon of soldiery—the last of the line, armed to the teeth, stationed just outside the Minister's door.

Noske kept us waiting ten minutes -—the only time I was ever kept waiting in Germany. Then he swung open the door himself and bade us enter and be seated, in tones that were so abrupt as to sound rude.

He is a tall man of about forty-five years. His figure is "rangy" and loosely knit. There is a decided stoop to , his shoulders. If he stood erect, he I would be over 6ix feet. His head is I small, with closely cropped, bristly, j I black hair, only slightly grey. His eyes are small and very bright. His moustache is long and drooping, which adds to the general loose impression 'of his figure. His voice, as I have intimated, is curt, clear, and snappy. He is the one person they all talk about in Germany. I had formed the i opinion that he was decidedly a personality, with an imperious will —a man who knew what he wanted, and how to get it. There were some doubts as to both, his honesty and his intelligence. After the interview I decided that he had lived up to all of my impressions, except that I had underrated his intelligence. He answered all my questions without hesitation. I didn't believe everything he told me. Some of it did not agree with, wliat I had already learned. When I asked him as to the size of his entire army, he referred me to Mr Lloyd George, "stating that the British Premier had given only 80,000 men as the figure. He told me how unfair the Allies were to exoect the German front to hold the Bolshevists in Courland. while they refused aid in transport and otherwise. He prophesied correctly that his men would relieve Munich in a few days. He spoke feelingly about the trouble that he foresees in the future—after Versailles. Then he was called away. I watched him drive off in an army motor-car, guarded as though he were a Tsar. He has chosen for his military brain a former aide-de-camp of Hindenburg, ' one Captain Pabst, than whom there is no more abler soldier in Germany. Pabst is a type from whiHb anything might be expected. A frail body, with a bi^ head, a mouth like a trap, and a will that has whipped the new recruits into something like an army— at any rate an army which makes one think even of the army of the past, as thev march down the Linden in the morning.