WAR NOTES.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 February 1916, Page 7

WAR NOTES.

THE REAL LOSSES. WHAT THE ENEMY. HAVE TO FACE. Germany and German Austria will, if the wa- lasts another year, be utterly exhausted (says the Statist), not because railways have been derailed, bridges blown up, tunnels ruined, houses burned, and so wi, but because the strong young lives which gave value to all those things are being reduced to clay day by day in frightful numbers. On the part of the Entente Allies the losses will be great. In Servia. Belgium, and in the occupied parts of France they will be very serious. And they will be considerable in Poland and Galieia. But outside of these localities the losses will not be such as to condemn the countries to a long period of impotence and suffering. There will be a few years, even in our own country, of poverty, not because of the material loss of life, hut because productive industry has been thrown out of gear by the war, while immense new industries have been called into existence. It will be necessary to demobilise the latter and remobilise the former. The process will be slow, painful and impoverishing. Still, the great Entente Allies will suffer little compared with their enemies. It will not be surprising, indeed, if Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey retain traces of the destruction | brought upon' them a hundred years hence.

ARMY OFFICERS AND MARRIAGE. Should young army officers marry? The question, says the Naval a,nd Military Record, has doubtless been debated for generations past, and it is equally certain that it will supply a subject for discussion as long as organised lighting forces exist. It is especially interesting just now to the people of the nations at war, and, judging by the number of "war weddings" that have been recorded since the commencement of hostilities, many of those directly concerned experience no difficulty in arriving at a satisfactory solution of the problem. It so happens that the question has just been submitted for official consideration, not in ono of the belligerent countries, but in the United States. Under the regulations in force in that country, it is stated, no married man can be commissioned as an officer in the army, but once commissioned there is nothing to prevent him from following his inclination in that respect. A probations! second lieutenant of the Corps of Engineers, evidently under the. impression that there existed somewhere in law or regulations a prohibition of marriage, applied for information as to the age at which an officer might marry. In the routine of War Department business, the lieutenant's enquiry wa6 referred to General E. H. Crowder, the judge-advocate-genWa! of the Army, who is the only unmarried chief of bureau in the War Department, and who, while replying that there was nothing in the statutes or regulations to prevent an officer from marrying, could not resist the temptation to quote a Greek sage and philosopher, who, upon being asked when a man should marry, said: "A young maii not yet; an old man not at all."