GERMANY’S PLIGHT.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLII, Issue 11633, 7 September 1918, Page 7

GERMANY’S PLIGHT.

GRAVE INTERNAL POSITION. The following message from London appears in American papers last month. Despite the glittering hopes dangled before them, Germans to-day see a great shadow over their country. That shadow is hunger. They all know from the Kaiser down to the Berlin -washerwoman, that unless they can obtain a speedy peace it will be quite impossible for them to hold out tor tne coming harvest. The situation will in all likelihood be so terrible in -July that not a few of the world’s soberest thinkers believe that Germany will collapse internally before her army can be defeated in the held. It is for this reason that neutrals who know Germany assert that the Germans, with their readiness to sacrifice the world to Moloch, will not hesitate to get rid of ail over aged men and women whose age and infirmity prevent them from helping to carry on the war—who cannot work but who must be fed. “ Such an idea is horrible and revolting to any one who is not a Hun, but there is every reason to believe that it has been germinating for a long time in the Hun mind. It follows the axiom of a great German military leader, who laid down as a first principle of warfare that not a single "person, with the exception of children, was to be given food unless she was of direct service to the military machine. The Germans are now faced with the grim fact that 6,000,000 mouths at the very least have to be tilled three tiroes a day without Tthe army being in the least better off for the loss ol the valuable food consumed. The cold-blooded calculating German, with his grim'devotion to the war machine, can never overcome his regret for (he iosa of these 18,000,000 meals a day. It is for this reason that observers have hinted that there is nothing more likely than that the Hun males and females over_ 70 will receive a polite intimation that early suicide will be helpful to all concerned, and that the hint will be emphasised by the cutting off of rations.

The Germans ware never noted for gentleness towards neighbours of kitdly feelings, but this regularly increasing shortage of food, this incessant sapping away of the vitality of a nation already eshauste’d on the battlefields of Europe, if continued, is adding to the acerbity of public'manners. There is a general hardening of the Hun mind against the slightest vestage of sentimentality. For this reason there is little ground to’'disbelieve that when the Kaiser gives the order for the aged to die for the sake of Germany the order is carried out so that the many, the younger people will see that rations of these remaining may be greater.