GERMAN ARMY NO MENACE TO ALLIES.

Western Star, 30 April 1920, Page 4

GERMAN ARMY NO MENACE TO ALLIES.

(By John Lloyd Balderetoa.) Is there a great German army, camouflaged by cunning War Minister Noske, ready to spring from the ground and' hurl itself east or west when the time is propitious P This host of a million men preparing for revenge, which half Loudon and all Baris believe to exist, is, I am convinced, mythical. There are a million soldiers in Germany under anus, if to the two hundred thousand regulars be added the local volunteer levies audi the special police. These men are all veterans of -the war, but this fact has no sinister significance, because all men in Germany capable of bearing arms are veterans. A correspondent whose opportunities of observation here have not been great, takes upon himself a serious responsibility if he definitely says that Germany cannot and will not fight within any measurable time. But I believe this to be the truth. And for two reasons, one physical and the other moral.

The moral reason is that the German people are mortally tired of fighting. They have been sick of war since 1916; and the very excellence of their military 'machine, its success in using up every ounce of strength and over}' scrap of material the country could supply before it went to smnsh, makes more impossible <ai revival of aggressive designs against other .States.

Not only would German soldiers not fight; there does not exist in Germany, even could the “will to war’’ be revived, the material necessities for carrying out a modern campaign. There are no fighting airplanes; all the effective l military machines, nearly 10,000 have been handed over already to the Allies. Aerial armaments can be built more rapidly than any other kinds, and these could be replaced. But there are not enough camion or machine guns to adequately supply more than a couple of army corps; and to turn out artillery in great quantity requires time, as experience has taught England and America. There are no iuaks, there is not enough cotton for explosives, there is not enough rolling stock, and there are no reserves of food. There is no navy, and without a navy, and with Heligoland defenceless and the British fleet in control of the Baltic, the whole shore of the Fatherland lies open to invasion. Marshal Foch has seen to it that the bridgeheads occupied! by the Allied trops on the Rhine are impregnable against attack, and he has also chosen his position so that the Gormans cannot defend themselves against a move forward from the Allied lines with any hope of success. Why then do> these million Germans in arms exist? They are in the present disturbed state of O'er many and in face of existing menace from .Soviet Russia, merely a necessary defence force. This the- Germans say themselves, and they might be lying; but officers of Allied Commissions who have investigated conditions agree with them. Some sort of adequate army is really essential because if the Baltic States make peace with Moscow or are overrun with Red armies, or if Poland goes Bolshevik as it well may, the Red Terror will be at the German frontier, and Lenin and Trotsky are not likely to 1 overlook an opportunity to extend their sway over ® great industrial country if that country lies undefended at their doors, Bolshevism, or Spartacism, as it is called here, is still the greatest terror of all Germans of the upper and middle classes. The revolutionaries are lying low", but their success a year ago in capturing Munich and almost taking Berlin in a pitched battle shows their latent strength. At present Communist propaganda is rife all over Germany, and it is not confined to the working class. Many intellectuals have gone over to the Reds, and Government officials say, with what truth I do not know, that Sparticism is being encouraged) by the Monarchist and Militarist classes.

Ludendorff and the group of officers who surround him, the great Junker landowners of East Prussia who find themselves cut off by the Polish corridor- to Dantzig from Berlin, > are said to believe they can win the sympathetic support of the Entente and set up a reactionary government here, provided only the Terrorists capture the country first, enter into alliance with Moscow, andi thoroughly terrify France and England with menaces of Bolshevism on their own borders. The <! Gott strafe England ” mood has already passed, and in political and business circles the desire to' come to terms with Britain is manifest. British prestige, not only in Germany but all over the Continent, has enormously increased itself since the armistice, and since it has seemed, likely that the United States would dissociate herself from! European affairs and leave John Bull the strongest power with whom Continental nations will have to deal. Moreover, the longed-for day when France will bo left alone, the day of vengeance, can never dawn while England remains faithful to her ally, not this generation of Germans, nor the next, will again face the “hunger blockade,” even though they be willing to engage in a Continental war.

Even German diplomatists can learn by experience. Of old, heavy handed and clumsy of foot, the German Foreign Office might be expected tinder existing conditions to play obviously to separate the Allies, but the men now in control here are too clever, and understand too well how hated they are abroad to show their hand. They know that any manoeuvring from Berlin to break up the Entente now would only weld it closer together, am 1 they are very carefully doing nothing that would indicate official preference for one Allied nation against another. They sit tight, watch and pray, and hide their rejoicing when in Home or Washington fissures appear in the solidity of tho alliance. Franco during the war was the least hared of Germany's enemies; admiration. was ft.lt for her gallant light against odds, hopes expressed that after she had boon crushed by tne irresistible might of the Fatherland she would consent to live on terms of friendship, though of inferiority, with her conqueror. Why is it that while other war hatreds have disappeared every German hates France

with a loathing too' deep for wards ? The answer must be sought not in events on the battlefields, but in what has happened) since the armistice. France is blamed for all the excessive demands of the Entente; even the surrender of harbour material in compensation for the sinking, of the German fleet at Sea pa Flow, though in reality directly inspired by the' British Admiralty, is here attributed to Clemenceau—that ogre with which German nursemaids frighten their children, that bogiei man whom all Ger- ■ mans fear and detest as their forefathers hated) Napoleon. In the recent sharp exchange of notes between Berlin and Paris the threats of the Supremo Council that military action would be taken unless Germany signed the protocol were' blamed, not upon the Entent, but solely upon France. To give up to Allied tribunals the officers who are accused of crimes committed in France or on the high seas during the war is also so repugnant to German feeling that I am assured it is the most impossible of all the peace terms to carry into execution. Germany has agreed to surrender these men, but such is the feeling in the country that any Government that would attempt to seize them by force might fail, and) neither soldiers nor policemen, it is -said, will carry out their orders if they are told to hand over officers to be judged, as well as accused, by their late enemies. One solution of the difficulty recauimended by Government partisans is that all the accused officers should! depart into Holland or Scandinavia. Then the Government need not hand over the accused, for whom the Allies would have to apply to neutral States. But most of the officers are still here and announce their intention of remaining and behind their determination not to run away lies a cunning political move of the agrarians and reactionaries who want to reestablish the monarchy. Most army officers are reactionaries, and) they have been made to see that the issue of their surrender can help: their party, because if the Government does try to yield them up a storm of indignation will burst 'about its head, and if it refuses the demands of the Entente it may be compelled to resign . True, were the reactionaries placed in power at this juncture, they also' could not hold office if the Entente demanded the prisoners, but a very important section of the agrarian and military class do not expect or desire office upon the downfall of the despised ex-shoemakers and school teachers who are now in control. They want a period of chaos, in which the Spartacist or left wing of the social revolutionaries will take power, and then expect the same result as followed the rule of Bela Kun in Budapest. So disgusted were the Hungarians with the excesses of the short Bolshevik regime that when the Communists wore overthrown no opposition was experienced there to the introduction, of a most .reactionary Government, and in these occurrences of last summer German aristocrats profess to see a forecast of what is to happen here. On the issue of the prisoners they hope the; present Government will go out and the Spartacists take charge, at least in the capital,-ami then they expect flic Entente, terrified of a Bolshevik Germany, will offer no resistance to the reinstatement of the old regime minus the Hohenzollerns, and may even extend the “old gang” its blessings, as it did in Hungary to the force of General Horthy.