THE GERMAN OUTLOOK

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18254, 24 November 1933, Page 10

THE GERMAN OUTLOOK

(To the Editor of the Herald.) Sir, —I was very surprised to read in your paper recently “A vivid glimpse ot the German outlook,” afforded by Mr. Gibbons in a talk to a Wanganui dub. The speaker told of a young German lie once met in northern Italy, who had expressed his enmity to us, and drew from this trivial incident the astounding assumption that “it was evidently a typical view of the German viewpoint. 'lt is hardly necessary to point out the lack of logical reasoning here, namely, that the casual expression (perhaps as a leg-pull) of one German should b« taken as that of the majority of 60,000,000 Germans. If such reasoning is to go without challenge, we could come to some surprising conclusions on national feeling here in New Zealand. One may hear at a street corner the advanced doctrines of Marx, and with equal reason concludes that New Zealand is disloyal to the Empire —an obvious falsehood.

To return to the question of the German attitude, I will quote extracts from an authority on the subject, Sir Philip Gibbs, who crossed into Germany in 1918 with the vanguard of the British armies. He says in “Since Then,” chapter 19, inter alia : “I asked him (a German soldier) whether the people further from the frontier would be hostile to the British troops, and he seemed surprised at my question. “ ‘Hostile? Why, sir? The war is over, and now wo can be friends again.' . . . There was no sign of hatred here on one side or the other.” • This rather mars the vividness of our first glimpse, and shows the fallacy of jumping to wild and baseless assumptions.—Yours, etc., R.L.L.