He hates compromises and qualifications,
and just lets you have his opinion--"biff!" as one officer expresses it.
"Bill and I have been thinking it over," says one letter from the
trenches, "and we've come to the conclusion that the German army system
is rotten." There you have the concentrated wisdom of hundreds of
soldier critics who talk of the Kaiser's great military machine as they
know it from intimate contact with the fighting force it propels. They
admit its mechanical perfection; it is the human factor that breaks
down.
Nothing has impressed Tommy Atkins more than the lack of _morale_ in the
German soldiers. "Oh, they are brave enough, poor devils; but they've
got no heart in the fighting," he says. That is absolutely true.
Hundreds of thousands of them have no notion of what they are fighting
for. Some of the prisoners declared that when they left the garrisons
they were "simply told they were going to maneuvers"; "others," says a
Royal Artilleryman, "had no idea they were fighting the English";
according to a Highland officer, surrendering Germans said their fellows
had been assured that "America and Japan were fighting on their side,
and that another Boer war was going on"; and a final illusion was
dispelled when those captured by the Royal Irish were told that the
civil war in Ireland had been "put off!"
It is not only that the men lack this moral preparation for war.
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