GERMANY’S TREACHERY.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 7917, 11 August 1917, Page 4 (Supplement)

GERMANY’S TREACHERY.

The Ivaisor, ns evidenced by his latest utterances, still persists in gulling his deluded people with the fable that Germany is fighting a righteous and defensive war. The facts are, of course, overwhelmingly against him. A remarkable French work has recently deen published ill Paris, entitled “L© Mensonge du 3 Aout, 1914,” and it is the subject of an article by Mr H. W. Wilson in the “Nineteenth Century.” The man who reads this book and still entertains any doubt as to Germany’s responsibility for the war will bo a strange man indeed. With the help of much information supplied by tho French War Office, the book exposes the whole series of falsehoods told by tho German Government on and before the declaration of war with France. In the spring of 1914 Germany made great preparations, which pointed to the imminence of war. She bought a very large quantity of corn. In May 1914, she provided numbers of bods and hospital stores. In the same month she got ready for what her staff calk'd “exceptional grand manoeuvres,'* involving the concentration of half a million men close to the French frontier in August. In July, German merchants in France hastily sent in their bills, called in debts, and disposed of their stock. The German Government suddenly laid an embargo on the supplies of foreign motor tyres in Germany, or, in other words, seized them. The published reports of the French Embassy in Berlin showed that the German mobilisation began in secret on July 21. On July 2-1 machine guns were mounted on Dusseldorf station and high buildings near it. On tbe 25th the railway stations throughout Germany were occupied by the military, and a movement by train of cavalry, artillery and infantry towards the Belgian frontier began. On the 27th the French observed German infantry taking post along the frontier, and barbed wire being laid. On the same day men on leave were ordered to rejoin, and five classes of reservists were called up. Germany was, in fact’, mobilising at least 2,050,000 men. On the 29th the famous War Council met at Potsdam, and that day tlie German Ambassador in Potrogrnd informed tbe Russian Government of “the decision of his Government to mobilise if Russia did not stop her military preparations,” which Russia had publicly announced, and which, in fact, were limited to the military districts affected by Austria’s action in previously mobilising eight army corps against Servia. Thus, on the German theory, it was right for Germany to carry out a general mobilisation without proclaiming a mobilisation; it was wrong for Russia to take any action, however local, against the partial Austrian mobilisation.