“CHAIO TRIESTE”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25951, 18 September 1945, Page 4

“CHAIO TRIESTE”

ITALIAN FAREWELL PICTURESQUE TRIBUTE “ We are glad that you are returning to your own healthy country, and that you are leaving that old sick country called Europe, which, if you were to remain here, would corrupt you all with its peculiar ills, as it has corrupted us—all we Europeans—let there be no doubt about it! ” With these sentiments a Trieste daily newspaper dated July 29 concluded a farewell message to the New Zealand Division as it moved south from Opicina, on the heights overlooking the city, on its way into Italy proper and down the long shank of the peninsula on the first stage of a long-awaited return journey to New’ Zealand. “‘Chaio Trieste’—one could read those words yesterday on the tanks and trucks and carriers w’hich came down the road from Opicina to the city,” the article said. “These vehicles carried far from our citizens our dear New’ Zealanders —these solders of open hearts, happy character, and freshness of spirit. ‘ Chaio Trieste,’ so written because the English' ‘ eh ’ is the same as our ‘ei’—they wrote it yesterday as they had learnt it from our own lips, it being twin brother to their own ‘ Cheerio.’ Yesterday ‘ Chaio ’ was not lightly nor frivolously given. It was full of memories, because, as many of them said, they were very sad at leaving this city, which had given them a more than tumultuous reception, had treated them with closer friendship, and had more intimately understood them than all other cities they had passed through on their long and painful way. • “And if you add the fact that they, almost all of them, have found an unexpected resemblance between the surroundings of Trieste and those of Wellington or Auckland, you will understand even more how they have found a second homeland in the true sense of the term. And, as for us, how could we not have liked these boys who overcame the last armed resistance of Nazi-Fascists in our city; who were with us from May until August, and who, above all, with their children’s games with our children, with their uncalculating ways, their, good faith and their close relations between officers and men, which make their army one happy family, have revealed to us that there still exists one country in the world where society does not corrupt man, but makes him dearer to his fellow-man; where there are not rich and poor, but only richer and less rich—a country remote from us and called New Zealand. “ Farewell, New Zealand brothers,” the journal concluded. “We like you, and you know it.”

As a tribute to the division and its origins such a testimony requires neither explanation nor elaboration.