WE'RE GETTING OLD!

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 1, 2 January 1945, Page 4

WE'RE GETTING OLD!

THAT LONG AGO WAR

VETERAN RUMINATIONS

By FRANK BRUNO

So here's another year—young 1945 filling the ranks when ] 944 fell, full of alarums and excursions, some hours ago. Whether it is to be —the point at issue when spavined ex-warhorses meet in cool taverns —another 12 months of war or whether the mad anvil choruses of armoured blitzkrieg will spend themselves like the dying of a gale ill the next f.ew months only the red gods know. During the holidays I met an old cobber, a fellow wife-beater and debtdodger of that much-abused First Echelon; and as we yarned earnestly in a little bar off Queen Street it was borne upon me, more vividly than ever before, how much "Time has a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion. ..." .'..., You see, already one's highlighted impressions of the more homespun kiwi campaigns in the early years are dimming. Tne explosive occasions; the mad-dog hysterical combats; the high-hopeless valour of some backs-to-the-wa.il occasions, and the cobbers who made them valorous; the crashing events which jostled each other swiftly across the war scene are becoming, insidiously enough, but a series of slowly fading or smutted snapshots upon the spool ol time. Rhubarb's Scorpion It seems like yesterday, but you know it's going on for five years since the black scorpion bit Corporal "Rhubarb" Pye. You remember the crumbling sand trenches that scribbled week by hurried week across the fawn face of the Buqqush box"? The first "thermos flasks"? The Tommy who picked one up and carried one to his n.q. dugout—and how there wasn't much left for a burial party? , What's become of Auld Jock, and Corinax, and the Koala? Beer-blister and Bolshie—all the rest of them? And Big Larry who walked those bitter miles to Sphakia with eleven holes in him, when Crete died/ What's happened to long Lefty and little Shorty, who "took' the biggest hotels in Cairo for champagne suppers, signed the bills "Peter Fraser" and told the gratified managers to collect at Army H.Q.? Wasn't it at Gazaia that the platoon "sarge" got that stray sliver of, 5inch through the throat? Or was it Alemein? We pick up months and battles and juggle tliem to fit events of particular interest;' to illuminate the clear memory of cobbers sleeping in lonely wadis; among rolling green valleys, in the snow-line of Mt. Olympus, in the red earth, of Galatos and Cemetery Hill and Malemi- 'drome, at Sidi Rezegh and the Tobruk Corridor . . . Yes. It Has Meaning "We shall remember them" has meaning now. Not the thin sob of a bugle sounding the Last Post, limp flags lowered, an automatic prayer or two. Each recalled event brings them vividly to mind, and for a space they are with us' again, grinning, carelessly cheerful. Latour D'Auvergne, of that famous family, a humble number in a machine-gun outfit, Alley Sloper and his gun-crew, big Ferdinand the Bull, little Snowy, who took three day 3 to die, hard; they're all there, leaving Valhalla for a brief moment to gather in a bar with a "hoppy" ex-machine-gun-ner and an invalided member of the Long Range Desert Group. Two years ago . . . three years ago . . . four years ago . . . nearly five . . . we're getting old, Johnny! Here's luck!