MORAL WASTAGE.
Under the caption "Moral Wastage of the German Army," the review continues:
The material losses of the German Army have corresponded with a moral wastage which it is interesting and possible to follow, both from the interrogation of prisoners and the pocketbooks and letters seized upon them or on the killed.
At the beginning of the war the entire German Army, as was natural, was animated by an unshakable faith in the military superiority of the empire. It lived on the recollections of 1870, and on those of the long years of peace, during which all the powers which had to do with Germany displayed toward her a spirit of conciliation and patience which might pass for weakness.
The first prisoners we took in August showed themselves wholly indifferent to the reverses of the German Army. They were sincerely and profoundly convinced that, if the German Army retired, it was in virtue of a preconceived plan, and that our successes would lead to nothing. The events at the end of August were calculated to strengthen this contention in the minds of the German soldiers.
The strategic retreat of the French Army, the facility with which the German armies were able to advance from Aug. 25 to Sept. 5, gave our adversaries a feeling of absolute and final superiority, which manifested itself at that time by all the statements gleaned and all the documents seized.
At the moment of the battle of the Marne the first impression was one of failure of comprehension and of stupor. A great number of German soldiers, notably those who fell into our hands during the first days of that battle, believed fully, as at the end of August, that the retreat they were ordered to make was only a means of luring us into a trap. German military opinion was suddenly converted when the soldiers saw that this retreat continued, and that it was being carried out in disorder, under conditions which left no doubt as to its cause and its extent.
This time it was really a defeat, and a defeat aggravated by the absence of regular supplies and by the physical and moral depression which was the result. The severity of the losses sustained, the overpowering effects of the French artillery, began from this moment to be noted in the German pocketbooks with veritable terror. Hope revived, however, at the end of some weeks, and there is to be found in the letters of soldiers and officers the announcement of "a great movement" which is being prepared, and which is to lead the German armies anew as far as Paris.