A SUBALTERN'S DIARY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19798, 19 November 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

A SUBALTERN'S DIARY.

WAR BOOKS—NEW STYLE. " There is a boy from D Company doing Field Punishment No. 1 down by the road this afternoon. His outstretched arms are tied to the wheel of a travelling field-kitchen. The regimental sergeantmajor has just told mo that the boy is there for falling out on the march. Ho defended himself before the commanding officer by saying that he had splinters of glass in his feet; but the medical officer decided against him. Quite possibly the boy is a liar; but wouldn't the army do well to avoid punishments which remind the men of the Crucifixion ?"

After a few years' lull the war book is returning—with a difference. Silent, perhaps, for ever, is tho high, romantic note that sought to treat the era of modern trench-warfare as blood-brother of the bravo days of Agincourt. If any of the young gentlemen of England now alive feel themselves accursed they were not there with their elder brothers in Flanders fields, then let them read " A Subaltern on the Somme" (Dent) by " Mark VII." These youngsters, to whom the war is " not oven a memory—nothing but a great adventure missed through an unlucky accident of birth — they'd like to know, they say; and their children's children rise in vision plying our ears with questions easy to be answered now, but unanswerable when the moss is thick on our graves." This diary covers the period July, 1916, to January, 1917, when the writer got a " blighty." Some idea of the quality of the writing may be gained from a representative selection from the entries.

July.—lt is the glorious afternoon of a perfect July day. The sky is flecked with white clouds whose shadows chase across the undulating wood country. Tho tall corn is ripening and between its stalks, poppies and cornflowers glow with colour ... on the hills beyond, great elm-trees stand like wise men brooding. The war seems far away . . . where beauty is, life and death are not estranged: they seem, as now, treble and bass of the same harmony. August.—Another perfect day; but against the blue sky beyond the High Wood an observation balloon hangs ominously. Anyway—merciful and delicious relief—the shelling hero has ceased at last. . . To our tired ears this absence of sound is positive and accurate pleasure; we drink it like wine, loath to break it even with conversation.

September.—Aeroplanes at sunset. Like a flock of homing birds, back they go into the fading sunlight. They take one's desire with them, for their pilots will sleep in sound beds to-night. Man has gone to his home at dusk for so many centuries, the habit has become an instinct. Staying here, we need resolution to break that instinct every time darkness descends.

October.—l haven't solved the Front

... Imaginatively I have it all right. But when I shrink to little actuality and think of watery trenches, sinister-looking crump-holes, barbed wire, machine-guns, bombs, and most of all. big guns and intensive shelling, then the whole place becomes a land of foreboding where blind Death keeps groping hideously. November. —A very dark night. We enter the sunken road. The conditions hero are terrible. The road itself has become a broad river of mud, in places two feet deep. . . I hurry off to tho dugout to report, and doing so stumble over a bundle. " What tho devil. . .?" "Look out, sir! That's a dead man," comes the response in injured tones. Shuddering, I realise I have kicked one of their number who has just been killed.

January.—Something has happened, but I can't remember what. . . Why can't that fool stop grinning and tell me. . . . He says I've got the company. I don't know what the devil' he means. . . So the diary ends with the return to England, having given the reader a glimmering of what war meant to many a sensitive nature, temperamentally unfitted for tho soldier's life. There is retiring unbalanced, no whining, no bitterness in the book, but in spite—or perhaps because —of its moderation it constitutes a powerful indictment against insensate horror of war, and it is well that our minds should be awakened Ere we have learnt by use to slight the crimes And sorrows of tho world.