GERMAN DUPLICITY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12067, 24 July 1917, Page 2

GERMAN DUPLICITY.

The Poet Laureate tells an amazing story of an anonymous American and an -anonymous Prussian who held conversation together in Berlin some four yenr. c ; ago. By 1013 the .Moroccan trouble had blown over, and tho relations of Britain and Germany were very generally supposed to be on a most friendly footing. Excursion parties to Germany wove organised by British devotees of "kultui',"' and speeches were made at functions in German towns, in which tho hosts were, assured that the people of those islands, with the exception of a negligible minority, were at heart the, true and affectionate friends of Germany, looking upon Germans as their racial kinsmen. Similar excursions to Britain were organised, and the same friendly parleying occurred. This pleasant state of things continued up to the eve of the war. Yet Mr Bridges tells us of his anonymous Prussian Junker talking quite freely in 1913 to an American acquaintance of tho conquest of Britain and the exaction of <an indemnity of 20,000 millions sterling as events of the near future. It ia, of course, impossible to "prove - ' such a, story, but there is no reason to doubt its general accuracy. It shows again the fool's paradise in which Germany sought to hill us to sleep, and what would have been our fate had we not done what was our plain duty in August, 191-1.