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Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 960, 9 March 1917, Page 6

The military critic of the "Vossische Zeitung," in a recent article, the substance of which was cabled at the time, declared that Hindenburg "aims at forcing a final decision this spring," and that he (Hindenburg) intends to terminate trench warfare, "when, owing to their experience in Rumania and Macedonia, the Germans will prove immeasurably superior to ihc British in open fighting." The Kaiser's new Minister of War, General von Stein, interviewed last month by the Berlin representative of an American journal, had sqmething to say on the same subject. To the German military mind (said von Stein) the long "deadlock" (deadlock —after Fricourt, Pozieres, Combles, BeaumontHamel!) in the West was thoroughly distasteful and obnoxious. "Mobile warfare," he is quoted as saying, "is the form which one must ever seek to reach. The Josses are less, because you cannot bring up such a 'mass of heavy artillery, and the strategic results are more satisfactory." Continuing in his own inimitable way, von Stein'added: "Mobile warfare in the West would be dear to me, but"—he smiled—"there is no use of our retiring in the hope of coaxing the English into such warfare because the English, and the French as well, would be chary of engaging in anything that looked like mobile warfare." Perhaps the German retirement on Bapaume is a preliminary to a resumption of the mobile warfare which is "so dear" to the engaging War Minister. If our Teuton friends are so anxious to get out into the open and settle the big question there, why is it that they have illegally used thousands of prisoners of war, and armies of peasants in preparing line after line of fortified entrenchments? Why doesn't von Stein, if he has any influence at all with Hindenburg, suggest that Franco-British forces should be lured into fighting on earth instead of in it? Of: course, the AVar Minister is simply "talking to the gallery." It was the Germans who initiated subterranean warfare —they dug in on the Aisne heights because of a fear that they might be Outmatched in the open. As they turned from open to trench fighting before their strength had begun to wane, is it likely that now, with the flower of the German army dead and buried, with an ever-increasing might arrayed against them, that the Germans will voluntarily return to the free style of warfare? If von Stein and Hindenburg are anxious for the experiment they will find their opponents only too willing.