THE WAR TROUPE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17319, 20 May 1918, Page 6

THE WAR TROUPE

y AS ESSENTIAL AS BIG GUNS. r HOW IT SOLVES A BUSH PROBLEM. ' (By the Official War Correspondent, j Captain Bean.) t London, February 8. , iac little war' tfpupes that visit tired s soldiers in drab places in Flanders inud . axe an institution that will not pass with > tho war. Hundreds of thousands of Aus--3 tralians, at any rate, iiave cc:no to know j u lll wc " - I fancy all our back country will know them to-morrow. For the Anzac 3 Loves" who are being sent to London this u eck for a change, after 15 months cons tinuous playing, Sundays included, at the rtont, are exactly as much a part of our national system to-day as batteries and big ' guns, and ono that will last longer. The only advantage of war is its directness —if the nation needs a thing it goes straight to it, by the most reasonable means. ou don t worry as to whether it is conventional ' °f unusual, or whether anybody has thought > about it before; you sit down and think it out for yourself or you go under, one of ; tlle , tw °\ If you decide that a thing is a " good thing, it is done. If soldiers fight i better by being kept amused and interested; you. amuse them. You don't leave it for somebody to provide it if it happens to promise profit. You make sure by providing t it yourself. != A SIMPLE NEED. We Australians began to learn that lesson • when we reached our great infantry camp under the old Pyramids in Egypt in 1914. It was a very good camp—well ordered, I i But it had one great draw- , J? 30 *! being in a desert, there was nowhere j for the men to spend their time, except in the neighbouring cafes and wine shops, ■ varying from respectable houses to fever and poison dens. Within a month it was clear to all that the military measure more needed than any other at Mena camp ■ was convenient reading and writing rooms, lunema and concert hall close at hand At ; Naadi Camp, on the other side of Cbiro the wonderful hospitality of the English . residents saw to the provision of these th.ngs from tho very first. The residents set up a shop for our troops at tho entrance of the camp, where an Under-seoretary of ; State_ sold cigarettes and post-cards to the men in the morning, and a deputy assistant engineer m the afternoon, and a senior , government medical inspector at nio-ht. lhey gave them a room to write in, and . ™ c ~y them concerto to occupy their time. But at Mena, for tho infantry, in * eer interest of our nation at war, the Australian army had to institute musks nails and. kmema. It was an obvious military measure. By the time we left, the musio halls and kinemas wore springine ud 1 at every corner. On Gallipoli there was no concert party. It was the one place on earth that I can't remember connccting with any tune of The ™ a , oir run by the medi«u officer of the 3rd Battalion and the good Dean of Sydney, but I do not know that anyone had the strength to sing songß of gaiety at Gallipoli. Anyway, it was dangerous. Once I*remember some of us did come across a neck in the hills, and heard tho strains of a brass band playing in the wild silence of that mountain valley on the northern flank, but it brought down shelling immediately. AS INDISPENSABLE AS THE GUNS. Since then, in France, the concert party has become an organisation which is as much a part of the Army as the Machine liun Corps. The one that is playing in London is one of seven Australian troupes it has had its losses since it started playing, and it has done its work under fire like any other unit. It was the Sommo winter which first made this concert party a necessity. Its organisation was one of the measures taken to meet the terrible hardships, and which was as necessary as the dry socks or tho duckboards. An Australian army would never go to war again without its regular concert troupe. In these drab surroundings, amidst overpowering work and all-pervading mud, it is as necessary to keep the men in good spirit as to feed them. The concert party, the club, the healthy rooms are necessary for our nation's work. "ANZAC COVES," ACROSS THE DARLING RIVER. I don't know what they will do in England after the war, but some of us have a dream of what they will do in Australia. One of the great problems of our country is to make life interesting for the men and the women out in the wide, outback spaces where organised amusement never comes and where, if left to private initiative! there would be no more brightness provided lor life than in tho dreary regions behind the trenches not a football or tennis club, and much loss a travelling concert party or » n ! a y- ± V, nc ' lever seea one of those theatres at tho front without feeling- that they have solved it; without seeing, behind the blue smoke curling from under a hundred old hats up to the bent wooden beams and angular shadows of the dim roof, another assembly of slouch hats and strong, bronzed faces wreathed with gusts ,* langhtei when tho public concert party piays them its santomime and works off the samo time-honoured bush jokes which help men to face this other war alongside the front m France. War is not all destructive and bad. Some of the constructive and the good which our nation is learning at the front—in sanitation, in medicine, in surgery—will help the nation to tackle problems of peace The national diecovcTcy for dealing with life in dull places is one of tho few good constructive works of tlio war.