NEW ZEALANDERS IN ACTION

Southland Times, Issue 17654, 11 February 1916, Page 7

NEW ZEALANDERS IN ACTION

THE DARDANELLES CAMPAIGN. GENERAL WINTER TAKES A HAND. INDOMITABLE SPIRIT OF THE BRITISH. (From Malcolm Ross, Official War Correspondent with N.Z. Forces.; An Island In the Gulf; Late November. For the last few days T have been marooned on an island In the Gulf of Saros. The weather has gone from bad to worse, and all attempts to reach the mainland have failed. There was one day that we might have started. It was well we didn’t. We should never have got there. For a while the wind was in the south. It shifted suddenly to the ■north. Then bitter blasts swept down from distant snow-capped Asian heights and lashed the Sea of Saros into foam. This morning we woke to find snow falling our first snow. Chambers, one of our servants, and an Australian, was gazing out across the landscape with curious fascinated eyes. He had never seen snow! And the snow was making the olive trees more silvery and more beautiful than they were before. Falling on one side of the fantastic rocks that crown the heights around us, it let new relief to their weird shapes, till they seemed like great gnomes marching down upon us. I have an idea the Bulletin his "Erewhon" describes such rocks as superhuman forms, and across the leagues of ocean, in far-away New Zealand, I myself have seen those very rocks on the hillside of the sheep station where he evolved his strange imaginings. The country here is not unlike his country, only the hills are not so high and grand. Rather are they like those barren hills, with their outcropping rocks, in Central Otago. This morning also we awoke to find our mess-tent blow down, and Moloney, of the Royal Munster Fusiliers; who came from Rangoon,- via Coventry to this war, and who was in the River Clyde and the first landing—was chasing away a lean, itinerant Greek pig that was endeavouring to nose a way beneath the tumbled folds in search of provender. One night we had a grand storm. In print we had been comparing our own connonades to the artillery of the Heavens. We realised now that the crashing and reverberation of the thunder among the mountains were more sublime than any mundane artillery that even a modern Hun can invent. Afterwards. when the grey pall of swirling

cloud began to break and take splendid rolling forms, wo saw, in glimpses of sunshine, the buttressed peaks of Samothraco in their new robes of gleaming silver towering majestically above the whipped foam. And other and nearer hills wore white with the burden of a bitter moaning wind. Summer, that but 'a little while ago sat enthroned on glowing hills and smiled on silver seas, had been supplanted by the changeling winter, wan-faced and cold. The New Zealanders and even the Maoris, who are used to a much milder winter than this, were standing the cold and the sleet and the snow well, and were cheery. The novelty of the falling snow deeply interested the Australians, and carried them merrily through the first 48 hours' ordeal. Their physique will, I think, enable them to withstand the rigour of the coming months even better than their thinner English comrades. At The Apex the New Zealanders easily repelled a Turkish night attack on a small scale. Our losses were infinitesimal. The Turks lost, perhaps, 50 or 60.

One day, through the mirk, we watched a little trawler or .sweeper, close inshore beyond the narrow isthmus, struggying in the broken sea. She had failed to weather the point. In the height of the storm impending doom seemed to be hovering over her. Towards dusk another and slightly bigger trawler went bravely to her assistance, and the two, apparently at anchor, buffeted by the waves for hours, were at length swallowed up in the darkness. In the morning there was only one vessel there, and she presently steamed away for harbour. There was wreckage on the beach a boat and some spars a.nd things. In the harbour, in a swelter of white waves, another trawler and a big cargo boat were ashore, on the sands, blow from their moorings by the sheer force of the gale. Could this he the same calm, glassy sea of Karos that for months in the summer and early autumn we had watched reflecting the clear blue of cloudless skies and the glowing colours of evening, when the. sun used to dip behind the rugged steeps of Samothrace? Hut now the sun lias gone far to the south ,ami the gorgeous tints of autumn have given plaeo to the sombre greys of winter. True, we knew all this was coming, but with the old British courage that won the old-time battles we arc still in our cold, damp trenches, and fight on. And, with the spirit that animated our sailors in the days of Drake, our vessels, great and small, still plough these foreign* seas, with no rival flag on the face of the waters, and only an occasional submarine, sneaking beneath the surface from some Greek island or Asian harbour, to dispute their way. Booking back over the pages of a diary, in which there are some things that I cannot now write down, 1 find that the change came early in October, with winds, a slight drop in the temperature., and a little rain. The birds, with the unerring instinct of centuries of migratory ancestors behind them, were the first to notice it. The partridges—beautiful birds, with red legs and pretty plumage —still rose whirring from the heath ; but the (mails had gone to a warmer climate, where the commissariat was, no doubt, more generous. Then woodcock began to arrive, and pigeons on a journey sailed swiftly for a time over the rocky lulls. Amongst the ground birds were some pretty little strangers that we bad not seen before. The crows still cawed, and an occasional raven croaked, but we saw no more the inconsequent flight of the little brown night-jar. All the groat grasshoppers, with their delicate under-colouring, and the beautiful butterflies had gone, and snakes lay dormant in the rocks or in their holes in the hedges. .Scorpions and centipedes and hornets ceased from troubling, and millions of pestilent flies - that increase a thousand-fold on every battlefield— though seeming to ding longer to your warm skin, collapsed and

died more quickly than they bred. All this we had to the good. But often, as the winds increased, we noted the recurrence of bully beef in various disguises on our menu, and tried our teeth sorely with hard biscuit, when wc would that Providence and the trawlers had sent us bread. Our mails became erratic and far between, and sometimes missed altogether. Often the first-writ-ten letter reaches us last. The people in their comfortable armchairs at home were apt to complain and criticise and blame the Post Office and the Army. But they did not know. Could the critics have come out here just for one week their judgments might have been less indignant, but more profound. In the air, as well as on land and sea, we had our difficulties bravely to face. November brought its bitter, gusty winds. The other day wc watched a biplane struggling in an eddy of foul wind. It turned and banked and fell — a heap of mechanical and human wreckage—quite near us. Yesterday, sewn up in their grey shrouds, with the folds of the flag of freedom —the Union Jack —spread over them, we put them—the pilot and the observer —sadly away beneath the chocolate loam of the island. They had taken their last flight—the flight into the Great Unknown—and in the springtime, when other of their indomitable race will have taken their places in the calmer air, the crocus will bloom over their graves on the shoulder of the hill just beyond the Egyptian labourers’ camp that looks out upon the harbour and across the little plain, on the edge of which is their aerodrome. During the past few weeks torpedoed troopships that once proudly ploughed the main are lying with broken keels and shattered sides on the sea-floor. Away beyond the island near Salonika the brave New Zealand nurses, with some of the soldiers they went to succour, lie there too. Off Holies one night a mine-sweeper with 250 souls on board went down in collision, and more than half the men went with her. From the' slopes of an outpost I watched one night a little steamer come ashore, and, for days afterwards, the Turkish shells sending fountains of spray in the air all about her. Their shooting was bad, but they holed her at last. At Suvla a destroyer, that must have cost £200,000, went on the rocks, and was similarly shelled.

In England we note that there been some talk of evacuation. In the dug-out of a general one afternoon recently, with the shells whistling over and bursting about us, we talked of this, and there was a splendid emphasis in his voice as he said: “Evacuate! I would rather leave my bones on the Peninsula than do that!” And this, I think, is the spirit that animates the breasts of the British troops here. These seas may hold the rusting ribs of some of our ironclad leviathans; the beaches may be strewn with the wreckage of boats and barges; the dead, thickly strewn, may feed the roots of the olive trees om Suvla Plain, and give a greater growth to the stunted ilex on the slopes of Chunuk Bair; but we are willing to fight on and on, if they will only keep us supplied. Ake, ake, kia kaha—for ever and ever, In our just cause.