"Our Mortal Foe"
General von Moser has published interesting extracts from a diary that he kept during the war, which he followed from beginning to end, as Commander of a brigade of Wirttemberg infantry in France in August and-September, 1914, as commander of a Prussian infantry division in Russia in the summer of 1915, in Servia in the autumn of 1915, again in Russia in the spun, of 1916, as commander of the 27 Wiirttemborg Infantry Division on the Lys in the summer of 1916, the Somme battle and in the battle of Arras in April, 1917, end in Belgium and France in i917 and 1918.
In August, 1914, he says, there was a most confident feeling among the officers, who were resolved that the only German reply to the "world war foreed upon us" is that Germans must' conquer the world, He blames the French Government for the fact that French villages were burnt to the ground, because it encouraged shooting on the German troops from houses, and when a house from which shots came was set on fire as a punishment there were no people left in the village to prevent the fire spreading. It was, he says, a short-sighted and fatal policy' to make the population believe that the enemy were uncivilized bar-parians and undisciplined intruders, instead of requiring that the Mayors, officials, and male inhabitants should remain in the towns and villages occupied.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.