Group of Neutral Newspaper Reporters Tour Defences Amsterdam, Feb. 18.
"The whole of the Netherlands today is one big fortress and the Dutch people can count on their Army to oppose efficacious resistance to any attacker," one of a group of neutral newspaper correspondents who have toured the Dutch fortifications declared this evening.
"The Dutch Army," he added, "is exceptionally well organized, its armaments are excellent and it can be compared with any foreign army During our tour we inspected a number of casemates and artillery batteries in the inundated regions, We found several hundreds of thousands of soldiers and many thousands of civilians working shoulder to shoulder with the most modern tools and materials to build defence works.
"The Netherlands now can offer almost insurmountable obstacles to any aggressor for the defence system is worked out at considerable depth. Every fortification is itself defended by other lines of defence works going right up close to the frontier, "Vast areas may be flooded in a single night and all bridges in the fortified zone are protected by machine-gun nests, mine fields and anti-tank obstacles. Furthermore, all these bridges can be blown up merely by the touch of a button," the new papermen concluded—Havas.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.