VICTORY YEAR.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 23 May 1917, Page 2

VICTORY YEAR.

A WOUNDED OFFICER'S IMPRESSIONS.

An officer wounded in the recent fighting on the Ancre ? Major , second-in-command of his battalion, was invalided to England, said in the course of a conversation: — "We all think out there, you know, that the next few months will bring the hottest fighting and the biggest scale operations the world has ever seen. 1 don't think there's any doubt about it. The Boches regard it as their last chance; and the effort of a desperate man is apt to be pretty fierce. It's not like ordinary \varfare,~the aim and upshot of which is simply the decision of which side is the stronger. In this war Germany is a detected criminal at bay. She began it with a monstrous crime, admitted by her own Chancellor; she has prosecuted it with one long succession of crimes, and defiances of all recognised rules and conventions of i civilised warfare; and she has set her heart on finishing it, in her own favor, by means of another monstrous crime, as bloodthirsty in its way as anything she has tried—submarining unoffending merchantmen.. "The job may carry us into next year, of course; but I havo hopes of this year, we all have out there, because of the enormous * improvement in our methods and resources. It isn't only the change since 1914, you know; it's the tremendous change since the middle of 1916. W-e'v© learned a lot since then, apart from the increase in strength and material resources; munitions and all that. I reckon our progress in tactics, for example, has been ten times the progress made by the Boches. What improvement have they shown ? What gains" can they claim in France or Flanders in the last nine months? Absolutely none; nothing at all. We've been gaining ail the time. Why. in these last shows on the Ancre we've gained more jin return for every British casualty than we used to gain for a hundred." I ' 'Eh ? Oh, well, they were an intensejly military nation at the outset; the most military nation in the world; and jwe were perhaps the most unmilitary. [ But you "ask any French or English Staff Officer if we haven't wiped the j eye of the Boche in the last six 'months. ! We've gone away ahead of him in the j matter of co-ordination in the field; and, mind you, we always were ahead of him in man-to-man quality of our troops. When it «me to the steel they . never could stand up to us^on equal terms; never in the world. And now we can beat 'em in the other ways. Our troops can march "to 'em now behind solid curtains of fire regulated! down to the last yard. It's a great sight, I can tell you; and it's that magnificent co-operation between our gun- ' ners and our infantry more than anything else that is going to rmt the pot on Master Boche's game this year. He's desperate, all right; he is at bay, and will put up a tremendous fight: we all know that. He will use every poisonous kind of trick that utterly unscrupulous men can put up. And on ton of it, when he's done his very worst—which will be as infernal as" anything the world has yet seen—he will be jyiped out, for an absolute mathematical certainty! If not this year, then next year; but we hope for this year. He'd get it just the same, if it'took three more years; and we think he'll get it this year. 'I never saw our chaps in such splendid heart as they are now. They've almost forgotten the soldiers' privilege of grousing. It make,? you feel good, you know, to realise you're part of a thundering big show that's" growing, growing, growing all the time in strength and efficiency, and working as nearly perfectly as makes no difference, with never a> sign of a creak or a hitch anywhere and all moving steadily and inexorably in one direction all the time. Oh, yes; I think it's victory year, all right; and I know that all the German frightfulness in the world can't possibly save the Boche machine from being smashed before we're finished with it." .