Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 197, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 August 1918 — CONCERNING “COLLAPSE." [ARTICLE]

CONCERNING “COLLAPSE."

Every day’s dispatches bring stories of the “collapse” of Germa nmorale, and speculations as to when Germany will quit. Since our attitude toward these stories and speculations will determine, in considerable measure, our efforts .in the war, it WiR pay to examine them in some detail. The first thing to be noted is that the official bulletins from Paris and London do not bear out the collapse theory at all. On the contrary,, those bulletins show the Germans making a very hard fight. The Teutonic resistance lacks the selfless devotion of the French at Verdun and the grim, unreckoning, cornered wolf effectiveness of the old contemptibles at Ypres or the Canadians in the first gas battle; but it is a very brave, very capable defense. The German army is too much of a machine to suit our tastes, but we must admit that the machine is still working. There are no panics, no routs. The British armies, with a score to wipe but, are averaging an advance of only

a mile or two per day. . One fancies it would be distinctly dangerous to tell the men who have just stormed Thiepval ridge that the German army has gone to pieces and the German morale collapsed. Next, there is nothing in the military situation to cause any active despair in the Pan-German empire. That empire’s armies are still deep in the enemy’s country, with line after line to which they can retire —if the fighting proceeds on the present plar—'before coming to their own borders Officers and soldiers alike, being utterly ignorant of the moral forces they have roused against them, may well hope to make a resistance that will wear out the allies, and compel them to accept a patch-work peace. Prussia in 1763 escaped from a>. situation far more immediately menacing than that which confronts Pan-Germany today. Why should not history repeat itself? Finally, consider the purely human side. Every Teuton knows that if he yields now, he will be despised quite as much as he is hated. Germani will be pointed out for a thousand years as cowardly bullies, who trampled and tyrannized as long as they had an advantage, and quit like curs the moment the odds turned definitely against them. They would Ibe overwhelmed by a scorn more universal and a hundred times more bitter than ever was poured out upon a nation before. There is nothing to show that the Teutons are ready to drown themselves in the ocean of the world’s contempt to escape the world’s avenging steel. There is nothing to-indi-cate that they are turning to the one way of escape from both perils, namely, a frank confession of their crimes and a revolution against the leaders who have led them into these crimes. German collapse is coming sometime, somewhere, of course; but the chances are overwhelming that we shall have to seek it beyond the Rhnie.—Chicago Daily Journal.