The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1914-12-16
WAR ECHOES

I New York Tribune: The return of the
French government to Paris speaks vol
umes as to French confidence in the out
| come of the war. The government
yielded eourageously to military necessi-
/ ty when it migrated to Bordeaux early
in September. General Joffre felt that he
might be hampered in his operations II
he had to consider the safety of the capt.
tai rather than the safety of the army.
| He was prepared for withdrawal south
of Paris if he could not check the Ger
man invaders in the valley of the Marine
The government wisely needed his
wishes, even at the cost of the confess
sion of nnpreparedness which an early
| flight from Paris involved.
| Now President Poincare and the houses
of Parliament are back, although the
most westerly point of the German wedge
/ in northeastern france still stretches to
Noyon, only 60 or 70 miles away 1t is
the firm conviction of the French gen.
eral staff that the intervening space will
| never be crossed by German troops. The
COuiSt- VI the campaign biilCc tue iibuuic
of September tends to sustain that view.
The German invasion has come to a dead
halt. What the French look forward to
now is German withdrawal, mob Ger
man advance.
The French armies are now probably at
their fullest strength. Deficiencies in
equipment have been overcome and the
prestige of French arms and leadership
has been restored. As Lord Kitchener
justly said in a recent speech. General
Joffre has shown himself to be a great
man and great soldier France has re-
covered her poise and is preparing to take
the offensive against Germany. That
change of attitude in itself epitomizes
the results of the last three months of
fighting in the western war theatre.
New York Herald: The news Of the
outbreak of typhoid fever. first among
the Belgian troops and now among the
Germans, is not surprise. Indeed, for
some time it has been almost certain
that the war censors were quietly sup
pressing all the news of disease as we'll
as of other forms of disaster to the ar
mics. There has never been war yet in
which typhoid fever has not killed at
least as many men as the bullets of the
enemy and often it carried off five times
as many. Rapid as were the movements
of the armies in the Franco-Prussian
war, they had to suffer severely from
the disease.
Fortunately many of the soldiers have
been protected by means of inoculation
against typhoid fever, but 1t is quite i'm
possible as yet that this protection should
be made absolute. One of the sad but
quite certain effects of the war, rhen,
will be a very serious spread of the dis
ease especially among the young SOL
diers, with untold suffering and death
from it.
War and pestilence have always gone
together in the past, and, In spite OF the
advance in preventive medicine and the
triumph of sanitation that is possible
under such favoring circumstances as
those at Panama we cannot hope that
large masses of men can be irregularly
and often meagerly fed in damp trenches,
amid constant alarms and disturbance of
sleep, without the most serious lowering
of resistive vitality and inevitable con-
tagion,. Before the new year begins we
must be prepared to hear without doubt
| of very large numbers of sick who have
to be cared for in the war hospitals.