THE "WHITE ARM"

Waikato Times, Volume 84, Issue 13188, 31 May 1915, Page 7

THE "WHITE ARM"

The fighting in the west has demonstrated that the French have no superiors in the world in the use of the bayonet in warfare, and only one equal—the British. From the days of the great Napoleon downward, the French have always been experts with the "white arm," and in the darkest days of the "terrible year," in the war of 1870-71, the French infantry did splendid execution with the cold steel. Even the German official history ot the Franco-Prussian war describes with admiration the wonderful bayonet charges executed by various French and Zouave regiments at Woerth and Gravelotte. The German soldiers, in spite of their relatively greater weight and strength, have never revelled in hand to hand fighting, and in the early stageß of the war, in Alsace-Lorraine, they became inspired with a wholesome respect for a French bayonet charge. The occupation of Altkirch and Mulhausen by the French about a week after the war began was preceded by some desperate fighting, in which the Germans showed themselves no macth for the French at close quarters. "Their experience of the French bayonet charge," says the author of "With the French Eastern Army," who was an eye-witness of this campaign "seemed to have* inspired unreasoning terror, and it is a remarkable fact that net since then have the Germans stood up to one. They have invariably either surrendered or fled shr eking."