NEW ARMIES PROVEN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17105, 10 September 1917, Page 6

NEW ARMIES PROVEN

YEAR OF BRITISH TRIUMPH. CAPTURE OF MANY FORTRESSE& A year ago we ■were thrilling to the first triumphs of our new armies, the correspondent of the London Times wrote recently. We had doubts—it can now be confessed — of those armies, not active mistrust, but sufficient misgivings to tinge our hopes. In the course of the year these new armies of ours have taken over 70,000 prisoners, including 800 officers. They have captured 450 German guns, with more than 2000 minor pieces like machine guns and trench mortars. This is the capture of a mighty army, an army of 10 whole German divisions as now constituted, with all its equipment. These new armies have had against them the whole military strength of the German Empire—that is to say, of every division in the German armies. It is these new armies which in the course of the year have taken all three ridges — namely, the Albert Ridge, the Vimy Ridge, and the Messir.es Ridge—on which, from Ypres to the Somme, tho Germans had drawn their lines as being the strongest positions to hold on this front, and enthroned on which they overlooked our preparations for attack. No fortress in history possessed one tithe of the defensive strength of any one of these ridges fortified as the Germans had fortified them, and held by the flower of the German army under the strictest orders to fight to the death and not yield an inch of ground.' Each ridge was not a single fortress, but a mass of clustered forts, and 50 single places from Beaumont Ham-el to Measures, from Pozieres to La Coulotte, were each much more than any Kronstadt or Sebastopoi. BREAKING THE GERMAN ARMY.. Thk w what our new armies have done

in the course of the year. Of course, they have won much ground, a hundred villages, and endless _ strongholds and redoubts. But geography is nrcmateriaL The task set theim was not the winning of acres, but the breaking of tho German armies, which, with 40 years of preparation, had thought themselvea invincible, and had proposed to overrun all, Europe and constitute themselves dictators of the world. Without preparation and avers© from war, the peaceful peoples of the British Empire, inspired by their cause and by virtue of the stuff that is in them, have made themselves into a power which first held at bay, them made head against, and now is wearing down the strength of Germany, and iof tho maimer in which they have done it it is impossible to spoilt in adequate phrases. And what is true of all the troops from the British Isles is true in equal measure of all the men from overseas. No country or .people could have a record more proud than that of the Newfoundlanders, with their heroic experiences north of the Ancre last year and at Monchy this spring. _ The South Africana were equally heroio at Longueval and at Arras. The New Zealanders a year ago in the long, stiff fighting in tiie region from Flers_ to Eancourt earned a reputation for steadiness, for coolness, and resource second to that of no troops in the British army. That reputation has only been enhanced this year by their behaviour in the capture of Messines. The Canadians have covered themselves with glory each time they have gone into action from the days of Courcelette to the capture of Vimy Ridge and the _ fighting before Lens. The Australians' achievement

at Pozieres for long-protracted, stout fighting has not been excelled and hardly rivalled in all the' war. Yet even that Was no greater than the magnificent way in which they broke the German front and held on to their desperate salient this year at Bullecourt, or their irresistible advances on the right of the Messines attack. . EVERY WHERE THE SAME. One can search these armies through and find one story everywhere. Not all the troops have equal opportunities, and often the part of an attack which looks in advance to be perhaps the simplest turns out to be the most formidable. And the behaviour of the enemy troops is always an unknown quantity in advance, for sometimes the Germans are tigers and sometimes less than rabbits. So that the immediate success of any operation is no necessary measure of the behaviour of our men engaged, and sometimes, as in the case of the Ulstermen and Newfoundlanders on the Ancre, failure may be more glorious than any victory. Not least remarkable has been the performance of some of ihe latest drafts. Every new lot that comes along we regard with something of the same doubtfulness as we regarded the' first of our civilian armies in comparison with the veterans who had gone before. Misgivings have always been falsified, and seemed ludicrous after the event. There is surely some fibre in the stuff of which all our peoples are made, so that, whatever iiieir antecedents, put to the same test they ultimately work out the same. Thowgh the job may be long or short, the army has perfect confidence that it is bettor, both man for man and- as a fighting machine, than the armies of Germany, and that but one end can come. It is a year with, which we can be satisfied.