GERMANY'S SECRET ARMY.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 16021, 6 January 1923, Page 10

GERMANY'S SECRET ARMY.

FOUR TIMES STRENGTH ALLOWED.

The very detailed revelations recently made regarding the elaborate "faking" of Army expenditure in Germany by transferring the upkeep of a masked reserve to the Pensions vote, will, it is to be hoped, rouse*our torpid War Office out of -its' lethargy" (states the London Daily Mail). Some months ago the Cologne correspondent of the Daily Mail drew attention to the fact that three out of every four of the effectives of the new Army were N.C.O.'s and were paid as such: The precise number is 75,000. One "will not go far wrong in concluding that at least four times as many men are being trained as the number budgeted for; in other words, the jiumber with the colors during tho year is not 100,000 as laid down in the Treaty of "Versailles, hut somewhere near 4.00,000. This is without counting an extremely belligerent body of so-called "police," who are soldiers in everything but name. PARADE OF CONSCRIPTS. The answer of the War office to the questions put by members of Parliament in consequence of the Daily Mail exposure was a denial of the facts. The public, is entitled to know who'is responsible for misleadihg the Secretary of State, who in turn misled the House of Commons. Whs it, someone in the War Office? Or was it someone in Berlin?

1 Our Cologne- correspondent to-day supplies us with further information which makes the official complacency still more unintelligible. Tho British Army has held no manoeuvres since the war, because the Treasury taes the view that the Brit ish taxpayer cannot afford ft. In Ger many, which is supposed to be bank rupt, the German Army has held man oeuvres on a huge scale this year, ami has closed- the roads lest the Allied Control officer:i'should see what they are doing. ALLIED OFFICERS. THROWN OUT OF GERMAN BARRACKS. Every demobilised regiment of the old conscript Army has had a call-up parade, disguised as a meeting of the regimental association. This is pretty good for a pacific and impoverished country, but it is not all. Barracks, forts, police station, all in Government occupation, have been found, nearly four years after the armistice, full of surplus arms walled up or boarded up;to deceive the vigilance of Allied officers.

These officers, when they prove too inquisitive, are thrown down the steps of the barracks by the German police tis at Stettin, or the gates of the fortresses arc slammed in their faces as occurred at Ulm and Ingolstadt after the discoveries at Neisse.

Hero Allied officers, refusing to accept "the honor of the word of a German officer," as the fortress commandant, put it, that there were no > arms there, pursued their researches and immediately convicted him of lying. Only the other day it, was discovered that the Inter-Allied Control Commission had been tricked into alloying Geman Coast Defences more than their quota of guns, by falling*into a booby trap prepared for them by the Germans. The latter had covered' newly turned earth with a thin crust of concrete and caHed it an ancient gun cm : placement,..and therefore part of the pre-exisling-.sijheme of defence "which they were atilhorised by the treaty 'to retain.

Now one thing is clear: Either the War Office has been misinforming the public, or it is itself misinformed. II it is tlie.latter, the question is, ,Who is responsible? BRITON WHO PROTESTED. One hears ugly stories of influences tit work to starve the Allied Conimis sion out by refusal to raise their local living allowances (which arc a first charge on the German : Government recokned in German marks) to meet the enormous rise in the cost of living. One also hears of a case of a British officer's being suddenly sent home whose only fault, was that, he had expressed 1 himself vigorously as to the deception practised on the Commission by the' German authorities. It is now-Well over a year since the British public were officially informed that Germany was completely disarmed. Since then not one case but scores of cases of concealment of arms on a vast, scale have been discovered, and the whole of the machinery fo; the great pensions "ramp" has been brought to light.