SECOND ECHELON

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 17 August 1940, Page 9

SECOND ECHELON

CAMP LIFE IN ENGLAND PLEASANT SURROUNDINGS I (From the Official War Correspondent; attached to the Second New Zealand j Expeditionary Force) AN ENGLISH CAMP. 21st June. | Never has the countryside of England i looked more pleasing than now. and; never has Great Britain been in greater! need of her sons’ help. “We are glad ! to be here. We would rather be here! than anywhere else in the world.’’ was; the comment of one of our officers. Sub- 1 ject to the qualification that they will' be even more glad to be home when i . this is all over, that goes for the men ! ; too. They are rapidly shaking down in ; | surroundings much more resembling those of a holiday motor camp in New ; Zealand than the accepted idea of an , English military camp. Tents are . pitched with an eye for safety from the ; air: here and there among the trees. When there is a row of them it is because a row of trees offers protection. There is no such thing as a canva!* town laid out in neat little rectangles. Those of the ball tents which have not been camouflaged are brown like the pine needles or the shallow-rooted grass on the sandy soil. Those that are camou- ; flaged melt into their arboreal back ; | ground, so realistically sometimes as ; not to be recognisable at a casual glance 1 j from a couple of hundred yards.

Men are quartered eight to a tent, j the tents being fitted with wooden j floors; and the unconventional surround- | ings offer more than the usual military i opportunities for improvising home! comforts. Except for the guy ropes of J a neighbour’s tent, and his canvas i bucket in the foreground. the view J through my tent flap as 1 write is all trees and fern: pines mostly (although; ; they are out of their latitude at this end j ;of the island) with beeches on the fringe. Two axes are at work; behind them two handy New Zealanders fashioning bush furniture and other interior fitments for their tents. Down a ferncrowned bank, beyond the cookhouses is a field ringed with deciduous trees; 1 then across a lane another, and. beyond again, a second such treed ridge as this is. To one side, on another rise and set in a glory of trees: massive, hoary, spreading trees laden with foliage and spilling shade far across close-cropped lawns, is Headquarters, once a stately private home. There Brigadier Miles and his staff work. This is the largest iof the New Zealand camp groups. It j j accommodates the entire sth Infantry Brigade as well as the divisional details I | attached to the Second Echelon. ! | Six miles away are the Maoris, and j | beside them the Medical Corps and the j Dental Corps. Other separate camps j have been pitched for our Artillery. ! A.S.C.. Engineers, and Railwaymen and i Foresters. This stringing out of units | will make administration more difficult 1 —visiting all the camps involving a j journey of between 40 and 50 miles—but I may assist specialised training. The in- j fan try battalions are together for the first time, and brigade manoeuvres will I | begin shortly. For the rest, it has to I :be remembered that England is neither j jas safe nor as empty as Egypt. There | I are hundreds of thousands of other i i troops in this area, and in their own ini terest it is desirable that they should j be as well distributed as military necj essities will permit ; Gas masks and steel helmets have ; been issued, and slit trenches are being : dug adjacent to tents, to serve as refuges should raiders come over. These j give protection against the lateral movei ment of a bursting shell, but not against | direct hits or gas. They are plain j trenches, usually in the form of an L i about two feet wide and five or six feet deep, in which men may crouch and be safe from any missile which does no* come more or less straight clown upon

Prior to the establishment of the first New Zealand General Hospital. the special medical camp placed near that of the Maori Battalion consisted in the main of its officers and men. The 22 New Zealand nurses who came with us to staff that hospital were quartered in private billets nearby. On the voyi age they took turns of hospital duty, and at a port en route a group of eight j was transferred from a New Zealand to jan Austarlian transport to assist in I handling an outbreak of measels. They j remained with the Australians until we j reached our port of destination. “BOOTS AND ALL” ! "Boots and all.” slangy but expressive, j is to be the fighting motto of the sth j New Zealand Infantry Brigade. The , method of its selection was perhaps not I strictly in accord with the War Office j way of doing such things, but the phase j has caught the imagination of all ranks. I and was, moreover, lifted straight out j of> a speech by the Brigadier. When returning thanks for the mess- ! age of welcome received aboard ship j from his Majesty the King, Brigadier J. I Hargest asked that with the thanks ; there should be conveyed to his Majesty j an assurance of the troops’ devoted I loyalty and their eagerness to come to ; S r *P s with the enemy as soon as they i were sufficiently trained. The sooner | the better in their view, and then they j would be into it—if he might use 'a : colonialism, said the Brigadier—boots j and all. ! 11 greatly pleased the boys to find one | of the more responsible London newspapers seizing upon this phrase to epitomise their spirit and determination. I the more so when the frothier papers i were playing up the “luxury cruise” asj pect of our voyage. For the time being we have done with luxury. There is I j stern work ahead, and hard preparaI tion needed. So “Boots and all” it is ■ to be from now until the job is done.