WESTERN FRONT

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 9 January 1940, Page 6

WESTERN FRONT

OUTLOOK FOR YEAR INACTIVITY MAY CONTINUE WESTERN FRONT, Ist January. The whole of the Western Front is blanketed in snow. Nature thus underlines the fact that so far it has been a war of strenuous inactivity. In the first two months General Caution commanded the Western Front; then General Mud; now General Snow. There is still no certainty that, when the snow melts and the roads and fields dry up, and spring replaces winter, either side will launch a largescale attack. The Germans have built up what they call their West Wall. The French Premier, M. Daladier, told the Senate that France had erected a rampart of steel, concrete, and men to protect her inviolate territory. There is no talk about attacking. Certainly, on the Allied side, all the emphasis is on defensive measures. The French talk always and confidently of means of defeating tanks, not of using them. NEXT NEW YEAR’S EVE The British Expeditionary Force has been busy building a defensive line with anti-tank guns, anti-tank ditches, concrete blockhouses and barbed wire. Its latest aquisition is a corps of Indian mule-drivers to assist in keeping up communications in all weathers behind the fortified lines. Thus, the year opens with the possibility that on next New Year’s Eve, the troops who are now celebrating in the dingy towns and villages of this part of France will be doing the same again next year without many of them having fired a shot at the enemy. It will be a bigger army then, but there is likely to be less work for the new arrivals, including the Australian and Canadian divisions, to do. There is a limit to the miles of trenches, concrete work, and barbed wire that can be ranged along the frontier. If the three armies remain on the defensive during the spring and the summer, the principal problem facing the leaders will be to keep the armies, totalling several million men, in good spirits and cheerfully occupied. It is a job which huge citizen armies have never had to face before, and it will present a special problem for the leaders of the Dominion divisions which have come from so far and whose men, possibly, will less clearly see the value of standing guard more or less inactively on the frontier than the men of the British and French armies. For many months yet most of the B.E.F. will consist of men who enlisted before the war in order to be ready to defend the country against attack, men of the type corresponding to those who enlisted in the Dominions in ths last war in 1915 and 1916 rather than in the first few months, when more restless and adventurous spirits joined up. SOLDIERS’ GROUSING The men of the Dominion armies will be drawing much higher pay than the British and French soldiers, with which to enliven their periods off duty. The soldiers we know best on this front are the hardened regulars and reservists who have served their time in the Regular Army. It has not been an easy life even for them to work till day in mud and cold, living in dreary billets for four months, and there has been a good deal of grousing, which has been the soldier’s prerogative since Caesar invaded Gaul. Certainly more space has been given to the soldiers’ grouses in the English papers in the past four months than in any similar period in 1914-1918.

There is a tendency to emphasise that the soldier of 1940 is immeasurably better off than his father was 25 years ago. That is true, but the soldier of 1914-1918 was saved the necessity and inevitability of his discomforts more visibly, and had a sense of personal achievement to take the edge off his privations. WAR OF NERVES There is a possibility that it will be a war of nerves rather than of muscles and steel on the Western Front this year. That being so, leaders of the Dominion formations should be thinking of it in these terms now. The Army’s first move, namely, the organisation of games, entertainments, comforts, canteens and “non-military enjoyment” generally may become important as the organisation of training and work in the field. It is interesting to note that the Canadians who were the pioneers in establishing army educational services in the later years of the last war, are founding an army educational service at the very beginning of this war. It will provide classes for everybody who wants them, and will enable young men whose enlistment interrupted their university or technical training to finish their courses while serving in France. If it is going a war of nerves and not of ..ction on the Western Front the army which accepts this fact first and acts accordingly is going to*»steal a march.