"MISSING"

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 66, 11 December 1917, Page 6

"MISSING"

TRACING LOST HEN ON THE

BATTLEFIELD

DILIGENT SEARCH MADE

(By Max Pemberton, in the Sydney "Sun.")

If, in an hour of calm, you look from a height over No Man's Land, you re " aliso chiefly that it is a scctio of liiyS" tory. Men have crossed that wilderness with the lire of life in. their eyes, have been seen for an instant m the whirlwind of the fight, and then have been 110 more heard of. "Carry on may have been the last words they were heard to sneak. The loom of tlio smoke enveloped thorn. _ The crash or the guns forbade question or answer. And so they were lost to our knowledge, and all that the War Office can toll ns at the moment is that the officer commanding has reported them as missing. Field Investigations.

Now let us see just what the War Office is doing in these cases, ana what are the chances for a man reported "missing." In the first place, let it bo understood that no such report is made nntil the officer commandinc; has made exhaustive inquiries on Ins own account. The lad went over; was seen in the fight: lie did not return. In ninny cases some soldier who was near him can give a fairly trim accoun of what happened. Ho saw Inm struck by a shell; he is sure he is dead. _ Ui, again, the man fell and did not rise or ho may have been plainly cjit oft from his partv. and is obviously in the hands of the Germans. None of these suppositious, liowever, satisne_s the CO. Men have been seen to fall apparently dead, and in a few months time they have been heard of in German prison camns. In the early days of the war fugitives roved from village fo village, slept in hayricks and in barns, had as many escapes as one ot Marrvat's romancers, and finally succeeded in crossing the THttch frontier long after all liope of them ]iad been abandoned. That sort of_ tliw" can Wdh' occur now—yet.it is indisputable that the miracles do happen. Let us suppose, however, that we CO drovers nothing. Immediately upon tliat our own department for dealing wit!) the missing eomesmtn actwn, and tlm jnnst "J*"" 1 " nro mad", British Red Cios.. informed and investigations are made I in all its hospitals.' also :n those of the French T?ed Cross-and. naturally, at ell our Nothing's more surprising than the wav in which a wound*! man wi" drift sometime away from !i'/> unit. He mav 1-ardly know what he is doing at the time, may crawl from crater to crater, lie there for hours, and then s!°eo the sleep of utter cx-

haustion. In >''* ""/I «>™ a T,; iiulanco mav pick hrai up. and lie will bit carried to »•*•* wH» p"«» day* mav oass before ho is discovered. Generally speaking, dcsmtc all our care, it is usualh* Germany that wo get the first tidings of our missing. Thev appear to be encouraged to write to lis, and although letters come very slowly from prisoners in the occupied territories, we.commonly have tidings from their base prisons or hospitals within three months of the capture jOf any particular man. And these tidings are written by the man himself— a concession which has been wrung from the fact of numbers—so many more Germans are now held by us wan British prisoners by Germans, "hey are treating our poor fellows better just because thev fear to treat them worse. And anxiety concerning a missing wan is not less poignant in the land of the Hun than in this country. Tracing Step by Step. So we may put it briefly that the stops for tracing the , whereabouts of our possible prisoners are these:— The officers commanding the unit, before making his report, ascertains as far as possible from the officers and men present with the unit whether any reliable evidence is forthcoming. _If not, he reports the soldier' as missing. In that case lists of the missing are supplied by the War Office to the Inquiry Department of the Bed Cross. Tha representatives of this body are given facilities at the hospitals and camps at home and overseas to collect information from wounded soldiers. Information so collected, if likely to establish the fate of officer or man, is passed to the War Office, and in the case of the rank and file is taken up officially without request from the relatives. In the case of officers, these reports, if sufficiently definite, are also investigated, but the initiative is, as it rule, left to the relatives, since the Red Cross reports are frequently numerous and conflicting, and it is found that the relatives have in many cases received more reliable information direct from the officers of"the unit. There remain the inouiries made in Germany to which end full lists of the missing are pre-, pared at the War Office, and a large number of copies are sent monthly to the Foreign Office for transmission through the good offices of the Netherlands Government to Germany and to other enemy countries. These lists are circulated through the prisoncrs-of-war camps and the hospitals, and by this means in an appreciable number of enses information has been received showing what has been the fate of the missing. • , Let mo add thnt (fatifch is snmed in the case of an officer until six months have passed, nor in the case of a private until seven months. Until that period has elapsed there is always a chance that the missing man may'bo somewhere in Germany, overlooked in an obsonre camp, bis letter lost, perhaps, or 'even that official callousness' may have denied him opportunities of writing.