FAREWELL TO ARMS

Greymouth Evening Star, 22 December 1945, Page 2

FAREWELL TO ARMS

CORRESPONDENT’S JOURNEY

Christopher Buckley, London “Daily Telegraph,” special correspondent writing from Rangoon in Septembei Inst stated:— I have finished my course as a war correspondent. ■ The curtain rang down upon the final phase of the epilogue at Singapore a week or two ago. It is eight years since I first heard the bombers over Barcelona and caw the guns around Teruel, six years since that warm, overcast morning in Warsaw so vividly remembered. Looking back I see it as a series of sharply etched but superficially disconnected pictures somewhat suggestive ol the trailer of a forthcoming film. I see myself first filling sandbags outside the Y.M.C.A. building in Warsaw on that first day of the war. How exhilarating and satisfying that occupation was, how powerful the sense o release after years and months and one final intense week undei the shadow of the brown terror. Then a twelvemonth of neutral capitals the taut apprehension of Brussels and Armsterdam, the Phillips Oppenheim Ruritanian quality of Bucharest and ultimately the high heroism of Athens in Autumn, 1940, when the undei sized, not excessively nourished soldiers of Greece, wearing ill-fitting overcoats and carrying antl^ a firearms, tramped their way up to the Pindus to repel the invader and wi the first Allied land victory ol the W After that visions of battle follow thick and fast—the acreage of derelict tanks around Sidi Rezegh, a Christmas Day unexpectedly celebrated in Benghazi (we made it with iust a few hours to spare); a brigadier in the Knightsbridge box reeling, with weariness after four sleepless mg i s, exclaiming, “We’ve got them beat, and so we had at that moment; and, supreme experience, the unforgettable night of Alamein. There could never be any question about the quality of drama on that The full moon shmmg on the fixed bayonets and the tense, expectant faces of the infantry; thej distant skirling of the bagpipes and then We perfectly synchronised, the thunde ous opening to the artillery bombardment. One does not forget the night ° f Longstop’ Hill, where the m'eni of the 78th Division fought and diec among the brilliant wild flowers of the Tunisian Spring. The long slogging matches up the Italian P en sula, a succession of mined roads an niilned and shattered villages, fhlong martyrdom of Cassino, the town which I looked upon daily forUhiee months from a distance of less than three miles, but which I was never to Normandy. The slow, dogged battles among the hedgeiowo -hedgerows taller than those whicn one commonly finds on Uns side ol the Channel; the immense of the German Army m the Falaisc Gap—to this day I can close my eyes and see every detail of those sunlit meadows littered with the wrecks of tanks and guns and army trucks and the twisted bodies of men and horses. I felt as though I had stumbled upon a. new Pompeii. . And finally the period of the joyous liberations —the cheering, hysterical throngs of Paris and Brussels, the warm friendliness of Copenhagen, and last the gay,, impudent epilogue of Oslo—l2 men m a Dakota with scarcely a weapon between them bringing liberation to a kingdom. t It is satisfying to have been onei oi those 12. I have often hoped that the air officer who jumped the pistol and took the responsibility of flying to Oslo and liberating a country before it was meant to be liberated did not get into trouble. You never know about these things. But a war correspondent’s life is not all an affair of liberations, with champagne and pretty girls and enthusiastic crowds at the end of the day s journey,. although such may be the impressions that remain most vividly m the memory. Still less is the intoxicating excitement of liberation an experience which the fighting soldier has the opportunity or the time to enjoy. He may have toiled weary months and weeks towards the goal, some city where he hopes he may at last lie soft and eat food other than army rations and experience briefly some of the amenities of social life. At the last moment his unit may be diverted to by-pass the objective or transferred to another sector, or at the best pause only for a breathing space before thrusting forward in pursuit of the enemy. In any case, his sojourn in these cities of ease is likely to be a brief one. Then he takes up the course again. THE P. 8.1. Looking back over these six years of war it is above all the British in - fantryman whom I would wish to commemorate. He is the man most likely to be forgotten. War is as indivisible as peace. You cannot easily break down victoiy into its component parts. You can seldom say, “This battle was won by the tanks; in that one the artillery settled the issue, in a third it was tne infantry who carried the day,” any more than you can assess the respective value of the parts played by the three armed services, by the workers in the factories, by the merchant seamen, or even the psychological warriors, in bringing about the final victory. , , But when we have paid due it apprehensive tribute to the Moloch of mechanised warfare it is still the infantryman who has the last word. The artillery may have done their job with the utmost thoroughness, but in the nature of things they cannot have silenced every single hostile gunner. The tanks may have preceded the infantry into action, but it is not certain that they .will have cleared every slit trench and cellar; or they may be in close support providing that covering fire which does give such a sense of assurance, but which still does not certainly dispose of the men ahead.

It is the infantryman who has to go ahead and complete the job—clear the hilltop, clean up (quaint, inappropriate phrase) the village, scour the copse; in peril from mines, in peril from snipers, in peril from mortar and machine-gun, and from fieldgun and tank. And not once, but again and again. It is easy to partake of this experience for an hour or two, perhaps for a day, and to depart with a sense of high adventure. The fighting soldier knows better. He knows that he will be making a similar assault next week and the week after and' The week after that. From a host of images I select two which retain a peculiar clarity in my mind—an ‘ image of defeat, an image of victory.

The first dates from the Libyan Summer of 1942. T^ e Eighth Army had put in a counter-attack, not a very well conceived or well executed 'counter-attack, against Rommel’s

forces in “The Cauldron.” I had accompanied the attack for some, time and then pulled out to write and send my despatch. Driving by cross routes I came across a little group of five inlantiymen wandering on foot hopelessly lost in the desert. German tanks had overrun their laager at night and they had got cut off from the rest oi their unit. ... They did not know what had Ducome of it. There was no officer or N C.O. among them. They had littL water. One of them clutched a single tin of bully. They had no idea where they were. They had come to the desert only a few weeks earlier. Now they were lost, without knowledge or understanding of what was going on. What struck me at the time was a fact I have noticed before and since that in the defeat or disintegration of an army it is less fear than bewilderment that characterises the reaction of the individual soluiei. Why were the enemy allowed to surprise us? Why have we been left without rations? Where are our airI speak under correction, but I am inclined to think that beyond a certain point fear increases rather than diminishes with increased battle experience. Your novice looks at a wooded hillside and sees little but a pleasant view; your old soldier sees the hidden batteries behind the slope, the machine-gunners under cover of the trees, the mines in the approaches, the booby traps in that seemingly harmless cottage. That is the true fear m war, the fear of the known, which can be even more paralysing to troops in the field than the fear of the unknown. Bu„ it was bewilderment rather than fear that was the predominant character r istic of those five lost men on that day of defeat in Libya. IMAGE OF VICTORY. Two years forward. Only two years, but a crowded lifetime of experience. It was the Caen road. Our troops had broken into the town that morning from the north. There had. been a very heavy air and artillery bombardment before dawn, but it was the infantry who had to go forward against a ragged wood thick with snipers. They knew what they were up against. They knew the German tactics of holding back from their forward positions and then infiltrating up into them when our bombardment ceased. They went forward m Bren carriers and on foot and they took that wood. I passed by a little later—when-the shooting was over. A little group was engaged in brewing tea by the roadside as British soldiers have brewed tea in the briefest moments of relaxation all the way from El Alamein to the Baltic. . They stood or squatted beside their Bren carrier. No one will claim that the Bren carried is a very formidable instrument of war or one whose very appearance is calculated to strike terror into the enemy. And this was a very battered Bren carrier, a Bren carrier that has seen better days. But that was not the opinion of its crew Someone had chalked on its front the words “ ’ltler’s ’Eadache.” In those two words I seemed to read the great strength of the British soldier, his jaunty humour, his refusal to admit inferiority to his enemy. I should not have cared to have gone into battle in “’ltler’s ’Eadache,” but I should have been very proud to have accompanied the men who gave it that name. They are scattered now, those men who fought in Africa and Italy and France. Many of them are civilians once more; many of them will be so before long. Ido not know what will remain of the comradeship of the field. That comradeship is a very real experience in battle, as any fighting man will testify.