VALOUR THAT REDEEMS

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 40, 15 August 1918, Page 6

VALOUR THAT REDEEMS

The almost constant employment of Australian divisions) and their consistently fine achievements, make one rub his glasses and wonder whether these are the units whose reinforcements have been short-circuiting for years. On the one hand, ike spectacle is presented of a recruitment insufficient to provide a rate of reinforcement adequate to normal needs; on the other hand, the cablegrams create the impression of a frequent employment of Australian troops with abnormally successful results. Of course, the seeming paradox might be explained if the figures were, mathematically given, revealing the disappearance of brigade after brigade, and the conservation of strength in the now unknown number of fighting units, But in the absence of such figures, the impression remains that the Australians; for an admittedly declining force, are accomplishing a wonderful amount of successful work. If they have been seriously reduced in quantity, their quality must be very fine to maintain so excellent a standard of performance. Relatively, the reputation of the Australians was never higher than it is today on the Western front; and Australia, and the voluntary system for which she stands, are entitled to whatever credit may arise from the situation the cablegrams present. If the future contains a prospect at all proportionate, those Australians who did their duty will not need to blush, when history comes to be ■written.

The virtue of the voluntary system is to provide a smaller amount of selective material; and the virtue of the compulsory system is to provide a larger amount of approved material. Each system has, of course, the vices of its virtues, and it must be conceded that the balance of advantage lies with compulsion. At any rate, to argue the contrary is to challenge all the principles of organised military strength, and is equal to asserting that old military races like the Germans and the French, and new belligerents like America, are fatuous fools. At this stage of the war, to seriously advance such an argument, or to attempt to show that military advantage rests on the side of voluntaryism, would be sheer waste of time. But it is fair to say that the Australians appear to have made the very utmost of such virtue as the voluntary system possesses. They have done all that manhood can do to make "up in valour what is lacking in numbers, and much that Australia has quantitatively lost they have qualitatively redeemed. The fact that their young men possess in the field virtues that are lacking in politics and at the polling booth has gone a long way •to retrieve the whole position. As we have said, the mathematical test is yet to come, but there is no need ,to wait for it, for the evidence in hand is sufficient to confer all Honour upon the fighting forces of Australia. And in rendering that honour New Zealand will not be backward. From time to time— both before and since the referenda—it has been said that New Zealanders despise Australians, and vice versa. But the fact is that such ,a feeling belongs only to the light and froth^plements of the two populations. Every Briton must recognise that voluntaryism, an inferior military system, has found in the Australians wonderful exemplars, whose hearts have proved bigger than their heads. And every Briton's hat must, in consequence, be uplifted in honour of Australia.