LEAVING OUT AMERICA.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 16216, 22 August 1918, Page 3

LEAVING OUT AMERICA.

GERMAN OSTRICH METHODS. The German military critics must dream at night of the American armies, though by day they write only of the French and British “strategic reserves.” The write of very littfe but those reserves. They count up the number of divisions which composed them. They congratulate the German people on their supposed disappearance. They describe how it was done. They now represent it as the chief object of the March attach, of which the object then was to reach Abbeville. They destroy them daily—on paper. Why they do this is shown by one vivid phrase in the Norddeutsche. It speaks of “that great army of manoeuvre which was weighing upon faint hearts at homo like-a mountain.” One would expect this daily re-exam-ination of the “strategic reserves” of the Allies to include inevitably the American armies. This is one of the most interesting signs of German feeling that it does not. The Kolnischo Zeitung has an article on “French Counter Attacks.” It describes how “Fooh’s reserves are being consumed.” At the end it refers to an American army as “talk which no longer has influences.” The Norddeutsche has an article on “The Sacrifice of Foch’s Reserves.” It does not mention the American Army at all. ■ The Deutsche Tageszeitung, on the other hand, does definitely discuss “the prospects of American help.” It says that American reinforcements can do no more than make up for the losses in the French and British armies. To do this it has to falsify figures. It speaks of the “promised 250,000 men from the U.S.” The first promised army was 1,600,000, and when the Deutsche Tageszeitung’s article was written over 500,000 were already in Fiance. But suppose that the Deutsche Tageszeitung were right, and 1 that America could do no more than keep the Allies at their present strength, who will keep the Central Powers at their present strength ? A prudent discussion would make liberal allowances for the American armies. Bold discussion would make its calculations with figures larger than the American armies could ever be. But the German critics do neither of these tilings. Instead they leave the Americans out. Nothing could be more significant of their consciousness of the limits of Germany’s powers. Contrast their ceaseless minimising of the dangers of the future, with America’s own readiness to face the worst future imaginable. Read the Kolnische Zeitung with its “talk that no longer influences” beside this: “If the Gorman objective should be won our country is not only willing, but determined, to fight with France, as long as Franco can fight, with another capital at Bordeaux if necessary, and if Franco should roach the time when it can no longer fight . . . with the combined fleets of tlie two English-speaking nations to halt Germany to the end of Time.” . America can face possibilities as remote as that; but Germany cannot face the future at all—with America, in, it^