Sir,—Mark Phelan’s excellently compressed account (‘How the Central Powers were defeated’, HI 26.6, Nov./Dec. 2018) is very informative. However, one contributing factor to large-scale surrenders by German soldiers is not mentioned. British historian Professor Niall Ferguson has drawn attention to the consideration that the cessation by British soldiers, in the last months of the war, of the not-uncommon earlier practice of murdering German prisoners rather than treating them as POWs gave demoralised German soldiers the confidence to surrender.—Yours etc.,
PATRICK McCABE
Glenageary, Co. Dublin