HOW THE BRITISH REGARD THE PRUSSIAN MACHINE.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7752, 22 July 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

HOW THE BRITISH REGARD THE PRUSSIAN MACHINE.

By IGNATIUS PHAYRE. No one subject to tho Word of Command may have any will of his own. Here is the voice of Germany’s war oracle—of grim Von Ciauswitz, the high priest of that Sehrecklichkeit, or Frightfulness, which the Kriegsministerium reduced to writing in a code that staggered the world in Professor J. H. Morgan's translation. “ Hut why slip torpedoes at a helpless packet boat?” asks the New York journalist of the U-boat “hero,” with whom he sits over beer and war bread at the Cafe Bauer in the famous Li idon. “Superior orders,” is tho laconic eply. “We do us we’re told,” say iho crew of the LIS, \Yhen questioned upon tilt ethics of hurling monstrous tlionnitc and H.E. bombs from Hu n . ht «?kio- with no target at nil be--1 w but only hated England. Now, it is th « luniu obedience which makes the German Empire to-day so formidable a meuaco lo progress and civilisation - the l • v er, as Kipling calls her — '• built toon arrogance arid disciplined in evil.” There you have it. “Disciplined j:i evil” is the secret of Pruss'an mass courage such ns we saw displayed oefore Verdun, where French gunners turned away and wept at the awesome harvest that went down before the “drum fire” of their massed batteries. We saw it .ourselves at the. First and Second Battles of Y.pnes, where tho fine flower of the Prussian Guard went goose-stepniig, as though on parade, to wholesale destruction. I’ve sat by the bed of keen professional soldiers (writes Ignatius Phayre, in the “War Budget”) and talked-this matter over with them. “We commence,” was the way a Highland captain put it to me, “where the Germans leave off. The unit in their army is the N.C.0., whereas with us it is the individual soldier. Tommy’s at his best when he’s fighting under no other control than his own robust and quenchless spirit. You can't suppress the British soldier. You can’t im-press or de-press him. Behind the lines lie’s boxing or playing football. As for Fritz, lie’s utterly squelched by rigid mechanical discipline. He must not think. All thinking is done by the officer and Ins N'.C. U. This works well enough at long range, hut the present siege of positions /s really a soldier’s war, and that’s where Tommy scores. HELPLESS IF I/EADERLESs. “ For without leaders the German soldier seems curiously helpless. He shows little iir'ativc, and the gleam o' a bayonet sends up his arms in pleading surrender. On the other hand, it is this close work that makes our men sew red, and grow ‘berserk’ in the famous ‘mad minute’ of their charge. And they perform prodigies in that mood —witness the last stand of the Monsters in tho retreat from Mons. Our fellows fight like demons, light with their own eyes ns well a*? their own arms, with cool brain as well as with a great heart. “It is this iniativc which enabled us to hold our own in those epic days of tho war, when for three weeks a slim force of our lads held at hay and cut up eight whole divisions of the foe.” There is overwhelming testimony that “militarism” does not breed 1 the ideal soldier —n social fact of enormous significance. If it did. the German should he worth two or three Britons instead of the converse being the case. Wo know how war is glorified in German eyes as a tiling divine in itself. The school-child is fed with sayings of tho truculent Saxon historian, Trcifcsclike; of blood-nnd-iron Bismarck, and ruthless sold»crs like von Moltko, to whom peace was an unlovely dream. “ But God will see to it/' tho great strategist was glad to think, “that war will always recur.” For the good of the human race, of course, and Germany’s duo dominion So the sword became the State emblem, 'liters are monuments to it; marks of t scar the University student’s face, and at the dank of the scabbard and spur tho mere civilian steps into tho gutter to give swaggering way to the officer caste. Before me as I write arc two astonishing inonw?ntoes of this madness—tho one a baby’s rattle in tile shape f a Zeppelin bomb and the other n rosary of prayer with a miniature shell for each Our Father and an Iron Cross for the last triumphant “Gloria”! WAR AS “THE”CAREER. So frem tlu* cradle to the grave the German l ooks upon war as the noblest of all ends and careers. Moreover, the women, banished as they are to “kitchen, church, and nursery,” support this lunacy in the wildest way. Think of I'ttle girls collecting sacks of ncqrns in tho woods in order to send eight marks to that natriardi of frigid chjjdiiiurder, Ferdinand von Zeppelin. “May we children send Your High Excellency a littic* money, which please to g ro to the hero who threw the last h.nnhs on London.” Here, surely, is perversion too dreadful for tears. And this war-worship it is which flies at the root of Germany's mass courage. It puts the whole empire in \ state of Kriekskemnss, or war-readi-ness. Civilian* and soldiers alike give Mind obedience to the Clnuscwitz word of command —the “ Kruppism and Corporal sm” which amazed Matthew Arnold half a century ago. At home wc havo seen a Zaborn heavily visited it r smiling at Dogberry in officer's tunic, and in Hie field wc see eight-fold infantry charges in dense column formation with certain units losing sixty per cent, of their effectives before tho final melting away ol an attack. “Tho enemy lias failed in bloody hecatombs,'’ says the calm communique from classic Verdun. “It was like sc.vthe-work on a colossal scale.” n Fi.-m li officer told me. “We held our bnath, watching the wide gaps as our 75’s and heavies belched forth with cartli-shattoring crashes. Eight thousand corpses in one narrow sector. Dying and dead rolled down the slope and massed in heaps where a. curve jf tho ground collected them. SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER. “Swaying on our wire wore clusters and groups of bodies most dreadfully torn. Wc saw more and more ‘sheep’ forced onward by their uteroflizicrs. These menaced the troops with revolvers, and even machine-guns, to climb over tli/* mounds of corpses in front ol them. And tlr.s they did in the face of our uevei-ceasing avalanche of roaring fir,me. 1 saw entire ranks go down moaning, or st’ll and stark, amid the IJig grey heaps of slain. Oh, it was blood-curdling to think of, and the horror of our sleeping nights.” But let nm man sav these Germans shrink from the last sacrifice of all. The way of the shepherd with the sheep is peculiarly Prussian. At NcuVfc Chapel',a our officers found the first eat-o’-n : no tails in the haversack of a Gorman non-coin. And the prisoners have told how savagely it is used in tlu* trench it a man ho slow to move or to obey. Near IMgvms the French found Bavarian gunners chained to their maxims, and

on the Dvinsk front steal 1 'cages were provided for the crews of revolverguns. No facts of this war are so well estabkahed as the utter disregard which Germany has for the lives of her soldiers and the brutality with which these are treated by their leaders in the field. Private Karl Schulz' was savagely lashed in the face with a riding whip for giving a cigarette to an English prisoner. Gormans captured by us have openly confessed to murdering officers who had exceeded even the Prussian limit <ns enforcers of discipline At La Ferte a French inn-keeper’s wife was threatened with death for interceding .with Captain von Bulow on behalf of a soldier he was kicking and beating in a murderous style. Tho man had been told to hang up a lantern outside the officer’s mess and had been forgetful or too slow about his task. Von Bulow knocked the fellow down, jumped upon him as he lay, then kicked him savagely on the head, and smashed at his face with the scabbard of bis sabre. Yet throughout this scene discipline was marvellously manifest, for the victim lay still and never uttered a single cry. Letters taken from dead German* amply confirm this reign ofi terror in tho ranks. “My dear ones,” wrote Sebastian Schauer, of the 'l3th Bavarian Reserve, “if I fall, write upon my grave:—‘He was murdered by the wardens of Kultur !’ ” And again—this time from a wife to her complaining spouse in the trench ;—“ Let the officers do what they like, however scandaloui, for you can’t alter the scheme < t things. But I should certainly show those wounded hands to the colonel. He will surely give you leave till the cuts are healed, and make that terrible sergeant understand that lie lias no right to flay a man alive.” GERMAN FATALISM. This fateful acceptance is the true spirit of modern Germany. The man •*. but-a. cog in a, vast machine, and all hia life the glories of that machine, and its huge potentiality, have been dinned into him. “Obey and Aic for the greater glory of Deutschtum, and be proud in blind obedience and death ! You must not think at all. What brain you have is but the beschrankter Untertaneverstand—the limited intelligence of an underling to be assorted at your life’s peril.” So that German fighters are brave merely in tho mass with that curious disregard for their lives which makes the “machine” so redoubtable a danger to a world warring desperately for light. They believe themselves led by super-men, from the great Falkcnheyn himself down to the corporal or sergeant who administers corporal punisaincnt at his own discretion. And the German lias faith in tho machines of the machine—in wondrous inventions of the war chemist, the engineer and inventor, who spring surprise after surprise upon the Allied staffs. I refer, of course, to giant guns and poison gas cylinders, to the flame-squirt and all the scientific terrors of a siege of positions—a condition for which our enemy was uncannily prepared from the first. “The chemist keeps his sword sheathed,” old Bismarck used to say, with quiet gloating. “Yet that swori of his will win the next great war.” Certainly the technical arms winch sup port our enemy have justified this co 1fidenep. The German was the first to reintroduce body amour. And lie has macli nes for all things, from cutting through w ire jungles to washing shirts and digging trenches or graves. He relies, then, upon the machine, I and as a long-range fighter is unsuipnssed. On the other hand, put him u: a tight place, with all Ins officers fallen, and Hans has little stomach i'or the fray. “Kamerad,” comes now from his beaten ditch, and the foe “hangs • lit a week’s washing, as scornful Tommy says of a white flag display of oidcc.enl haste and volume. At the same time it were absurd io deny the German liis meed of physical, and moral prowess. The l famous Fokker pilots, Herron Booleke and Immelmann, nr,o outstanding cases of pure skill and s : nglo-hand,ed daring. The last-named was c redited .with his thirteenth aerial victim, and, throughout fought cleanly and played the game. Another German airman dropped a wreath of remembrance over an Alsatian town, paying a tribute to his French adversary, Pegoud, “who died a hero’s death.” NOT "WITHOUT CHIVALRY. I could relate cases of chivalrous action towards our wounded. So could young recruits swarnrng in the open with loud " I lochs" and student songs. Time after time they were swept away, yet they reformed to advance once more over theijr own dead upon the famous Vimy Ridge. “The German so’(.Tiers' vary in quality,” one of our officers tolu me “Saxon, Bavarian, Wurtemhurger, and the rest. I consider the Prussian corps d’clite quite superb soldiers. We’ve seen them c harge twenty-seven times in one day in the teeth of massed guns and our best bombe rs till liie ground was kneedeep in their dead and dying.” Another opinion J got praised the “resigned heroism of the German infantry, who give up tlio : r lives as devotees rather then ordinary soldiers.” All our officers agree that* the German sniper :.s a man of diabolic cunning, entirely reckless of bi.s own safely. But eve n the sniper must be linked with wire with bis officer, ns part of the mighty machine wlrch “disciplined evil” lias raised to such a pow.er, fort'lied h.v science of a malign and perverted kind. It would be stup'd to belittle ilio mass-courage of tho Ka.iser’s hordes, or even tho chivalry of sailors like tho Count von Spee, who refused to honour the toast of “Damnation to the British Navy" when his adnrrors gave it in far-off V,a Inara 'so. On land, in the air, and at w:mu* dash with a. fanatic foe, and, as Kip ling says, no jwvire may he made with him till tho German War-Lord “has been taught that there is a God other than bis own lust.”