Berlin Fiction

Exposure from all quarters

Austrians shirk fight

It is still possible, although not without diligent study, to derive information from the official reports concocted at Berlin and Vienna, particularly when the exigencies of time have prevented collusion.

For the most part, however, the half-truths are now smothered in fiction and such claims as those just advanced with regard to the eastern front are manifestly absurd.

Berlin – for ‘Main Headquarters’ merely means William Street now asserts that during May the Germans captured over 300,000 Russians and more than half of them by Mackenson’s forces. It is not true. At the best it is the grossest of exaggerations.

Taught by a previous blunder, the managers and scribes of the fiction department make the number of captured guns more proportionate to the total of prisoners but the narrative, nevertheless, remains unconvincing.

An example of the half truth is provided in the report on the western front. Berlin says ‘The sugar refinery east of Souchez, into which the French had penetrated, had been recaptured again by us.’

The story is supposed to end here, but there is a third chapter. As the rest of the world knows, the French again stormed the place and now holds it secure.

These illustrations of the German method should make us chary in accepting anything emanating from Berlin.

Certainly the claims that threatened the Premysl forts and the town of Stryi have been captured using the weeks operations are not borne out by the Pentrograd message published yesterday and what success has been achieved had not been against ‘forts’ but positions demolished many weeks ago.

Details were given in the Russians report of a fierce attack on Fort no. 7 or the Permysl defences. An attack after some fierce and prolonged fighting resulted in the repulse of the enemy and the capture of the remnants of force engaged in the assault – 23 officers and 600 men.

With reference to the alleged capture of Stryj; the communique had to say – ‘the result of the fighting is not yet known’.

Wednesday’s official report from Petrograd to hand this morning constitutes a further exposure of German territories.

It states, for example, that ‘in Galicia from the 31st, on the front between the Vistula and Premysl, very stubborn fighting has been developing again. Our troops gained somewhat important successes on the left of the Lower San, taking several villages, some at the point of the bayonet.

‘On the right bank of the same river successes were also achieved, 1,200 prisoners being taken.

‘Beaten forces cannot do this kind of thing, nor armies reduced, in prisoners alone, by 300,000 officers and men!’ As to Premysl itself, the Russian General Staff now inform us that the enemy delivered the principal attack against the North front on the region of the forts Nos. 10 and 11, ‘which the Austrians had almost completely demolished before the surrender of the fortress’.

Some Russian guns were captured but they were not left ‘until the last shell was spent’. What German successes were achieved were frankly admitted and a perusal of the full report is recommended.