GERMANY: Grim Games

Swift “tanks” sped over the hills of Württemberg—they were really motor trucks. Huge “bombers” and darting “pursuit planes” soared aloft—they were only toy balloons towed by motorcyclists. Great “howitzers” and “field guns” rumbled past—they were made of wood. Finally 25,000 soldiers marched, skirmished and countermarched amid clouds of “poison gas”—the gas was a nonpoisonous chemical fog, the latest invention of German scientists. Thus the traditional autumn maneuvres of the German army took place last week with vivid realism, despite the disarming of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles.

President von Hindenburg, attired as a feldmarschall, spent the week at, that picturesque Württemberg spa, Bad Mergentheim, sallied forth daily to watch the maneuvres with Defense Minister Gessler and General von Seeckt. From a hilltop Old Paul von Hindenburg watched in high good humor the game which he once played in such deadly earnest. On the hilltop with him stood a U. S. and a Soviet Russian military observer.

Since General von Seeckt, the directing genius of the Reichswehr, has declared: “Trench warfare is out of date,” the war games were featured chiefly by attempts to maneuvre at tremendous speed and as much under cover as possible. Several battalions were marched over hill and dale as far as 25 miles in one day, and the trucks representing tanks were driven at breakneck speed.

The President and his Defense Minister Gessler were “billeted” at the famed Palace of the Order of the Teutonic Knights at Bad Mergentheim. There they were feted lustily. There Dr. Gessler, tactful, did not recall a certain scandalous incident which occurred in his presence during last year’s war games (TIME, Nov. 9).

At the time Dr. Gessler was standing on a little knoll near Leuthen, Saxony, with General Mueller, commander of the Saxon Reichswehr. A machine gun battery, using ammunition left over from the World War, was firing a barrage over their heads. Suddenly General Mueller clutched his side, fell dead. A bullet, its charge weakened by age, had fallen short.

This year no such accident befell for only blank cartridges were used.

Well pleased at the maneuvres, President von Hindenburg said: “I have seen today that the German army’s traditional standard of spirit and skill has been preserved.”