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AN AMAZING WAR

“THE EASTERN FRONT.”

MR CHURCHILL’S HISTORY.

. The tireless and prolific Mr Winston Churchill, not content with* writing six fat volumes on the history of the war, has rounded off his prodigious labours by issuing another momentous volume of “The World Crisis,’’ says an exchange. It deals principally with the military events on the Eastern front. The inside history of those stupendous operations remains, even 17 years after their occurrence, a closed book to English-speaking people, dwarfed as they were by the closer and more urgent events cfn the Western front. Mr- Churchill, indeed, calls it “The Unknown War,’’ which, but for the shattering battles in France and Flanders, would be known to posterity as incomparably • the. greatest war in history. - , • ‘ The sentences that hammer forcibly upon even tho dullest imagination Mr Churchill sketches the immense scope and consequences of the conflict. “In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of tho combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it fag surpasses the magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes,” lie says. “It is also the most mournful conflict. of which there ,is record. AH'throe empires, both sides, victors and vanquished, were ruined. All the Emperors or their successors were slain or deposed; The Houses of Romanov, Hapsburg and Hohenzollerfi, woven over centuries of renown into the texture of Europe, werp shattered and extirpated.

- 'THE MACAULAY MANNER.,. “These pages record the toils, perils, sufferings and passion of millions of men. Their sweat', their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain. Ten million homes awaited the return of the warriors. A hundred cities prepared to acclaim their triumphs. But all were defeated; all were stricken; everything that they had given was given in vain. The hideous injuries they inflicted and bore, the privations they endured, the grand loyalties they exemplified, all were in vain. Nothing was gained by any. They floundered fn the mud, they perished in the snow drifts, they starved in the frost. Those that survived, the veterans of countless battle-days, returned, whether with the laurels of victory or tidings of disaster, to homos engulfed already in catastrophe.” • „ This is worthy language for one who is ranked, with Mr Lloyd George, as the greatest living oratob among the English-speaking peoples. All through this grapnic catalogue of glorious victories and grim disasters are similar pnssages recalling the descriptivo composition of Macaulay and Carlyle. It makes exciting reading and colours ' in brilliant raiment a book whose cover, once opened, cannot be closed until the last dramatic episode is related and the final flight of oratory finishes. -

ASSASSINS OF SARAJEVO. The early chapters on the origins off the war, although dealing* in the main with matters exhaustively covered in the first volume, throw more detailed illumination on the underlying enmity between Austria and Serbia, on the relations between Germany and Austria, and on the growing domination of the military caste Over the aged and weakening Emperor, Francis Joseph., .The murder of Sarajevo is irteticullously described in the full glare of post-war knowledge. “At least seven assassins had taken thejr stations at various points upon the probable royal route. Every one of the three bridges had its two or three murderers in waiting.” These men, supplied by the Serbian Black Hand, whose leader was Colonel Dimitriyevitch, head of the Serbian Intelligence staff with bombs and Browning pistols, which they had been taught toi use, and each carrying cyanide of potassium for suicide in the last resort, took no chances, and their dread task was made doubly easy by the criminal neglect of the Governor of Bosnia, General Potiorek, to furnish a military guard in the streets. The fatalistic manner in which Europe was plunged into war . turns the blood cold when the inner secrets of that tortuous diplomacy,; brought to Ijght with the publication of memoirs and documents dragged out of German, Austraian and Russian archives, and marshalled into the confines of a single chapter. On July 8 tho ultimatum of Serbia is drawn up and signed, but by mutual agreement among the' Austrian leaders it is not to be presented to Serbia for 14 days.

THE WILY AUSTRIANS. i ■ “Jt would be a good thing,” says Count Berchtold, the Foreign Minister, to Field-Marshal Conrad von Hotzendorf, the Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Hungarian armies, “if you and the War Minister would go on leave for a time, in order to preserve the appearance that nothing is happening.” So fo!r 14 days the murmunngs excited by the murder of Sarajevo sank into the calm before the storm and were forgotten by all save' the small coterie of officers and diplomats in Central Europe. . In the campaigns that followed, Austria at every point was the scapegoat and the villain. Her commanders in the field appeared to be guilty of more prime errors of judgment than the war lords of any other combatant. Conrad’s fatal mistake in connection with mobilisation when he moved his reserve army, the Second, against Serbia instead of Russia, was the first of a long series of frightful disasters. Realising his error when it was too late, the Australian commander-in chief tried to bring it back to face the gigantic might of Russia in the north, only to waste in doing so three of tho most precious weeks in the war, thereby “fooling away 'the power bf the Second Army in both theatres.” REAL VICTOR OF TANNENBERG.

Mr Churchill is inclined to award the laurels for the German victory at Tannenberg to General von Francois rather than to Hindenberg or Ludendorf. “The credit of the victory belongs in large measure to General Hoffman, but its glory must for ever be associated with General yon Francois; Svbo, though commanding only a single corps, acted with that rare alteration of -prduence and audacity which is the characteristic' of true soldierly genius, and who upon his justly-founded convictions defied Ludendorf and gained for him a dazzling victory against his orders.”

But Tannenberg is not the only battle to which Mr Churchill brings his ' strategic knowledge, his literary talents and his innate genius for telling a good story. All the terrifio battles in Russia, Poland and Serbia are described and astutely analysed, with a profusion of maps to make the matter plain. He takes us into the care-fully-guarded general headquarters, of the contending armies on the eve of every important battle and shows us the minds of the generals at work. And when he wishes to describe some personal tit-bit concerning these forbidding personalities he summons to his aid a sly humour that makes his book a treasure-house to the layman reader. Thus the marriage of the Austrian commpnder-in-chicf in 1915; “The Emr

peror Francis Joseph manifested marked disapprobation. He deemed matr - monial adventures incongruous in a chief-of-&taff in full crisis of war. . . . Conrad’s popularity with the nation to whose service he was devoted was fatally affected. He was no longer in a position to sustain the renewal of defeat. There was a feeling, that tor great commanders Armageddon ougnt to be an all-sufficing occupation.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/MS19320127.2.119

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 48, 27 January 1932, Page 12

Word count
Tapeke kupu
1,169

AN AMAZING WAR Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 48, 27 January 1932, Page 12

AN AMAZING WAR Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 48, 27 January 1932, Page 12

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