PREPAREDNESS!

Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 698, 6 May 1916, Page 8

PREPAREDNESS!

! AMERICA AT WAR. I HER TROUBLES IN MEXICO. i ; GUNS WON'T WORK; AEROPLANES CRUMBLE. I j | Writing under date April 10 from I Los Angeles, Otheman Stevens, one-time ! war correspondent at General Funston's i headquarters, pictures the American j punitive force in pursuit of Villa as I being in anything but fighting fix. The I article is a powerful argument in favour of preparedness.] I i The most capable and gallant of ! soldiers is the American. j The most pathetic of all armies i is the American. • Military knowledge is not neccs- | sary to arrive at those just conj elusions. Four weeks spent along the bor- ! der is sufficient to prove both. | Pancho Villa raids Columbus. | Colonel Slocum's forces repel the | Villistas easily, kill not quite enough, but an interestingly large number, chase them into their holes many miles over the line. BlT—the machine guns jam after a few rounds and The scrap is left a man-to-man affair, with no benefit of the supposedly adequate backing of superior mechanical details. A stall' officer at Fort Sam Houston said:— "If Slocum's machine guns had worked properly it would have been impossible for a single Mexican to have gotten back across the line. They did not work." General Pershing, when he went over after Villa, had eight aeroplanes, with a force of thoroughly trained army aviators. ', The lirst day out two of the planes were disabled through defects, a third fell and broke itself and its aviator's nose, and one by one the others pegged out, leaving, as T remember, four; these were of constantly decreasing horse-power, entirely inadequate to the attenuated atmosphere of the elevation of the Chihuahua plateau. An inefficient War Department, or [ bureau chief, or Congress, whichever i may be responsible, forced devoted, unshrinking American officers to fly in these childishly absurd planes. Useless Wireless Outfits. There are, 1 was told, two or three tractor wireless plants for the whole army. These are intended to supplement the work of a few pack animal field plants, which have a radius of ',)() miles or so. For the first week or 10 days of the advance of the Pershing column these wireless outfits were worse than useless. They transmitted messages to General Funston at Fori Sam Houston, which his most expert decoders could not read; they had to he retransmitted to the chief of stall' at Columbus for re-retransmittal to General Pershing for re-re-retrans-mit tal to General Funston, before even a guess could be made at their contents. Not one" of these essentials of all essentials worked for the ultracritical first week of General Pershing's progress. When the column was preparing to go over there were only a few companies of motor trucks in the entire army. Trucks and street sprinkling wagons for tanks were gathered as fast as could be from neighbouring towns, and General Funston has since been buying trucks and having them shipped by special trains to Columbus. It just happened that the market was such that it enabled him to make good the deficiency which again, either the War Department, a bureau chief, or Congress, had inanely created. Army men ascribe the fault to Congress; Congressmen ascribe it to the War Department; probably the War Department would blame some bureau chief. Isn't it time for the American people to do some blaming and some punishing themselves? There was a group of correspondents in General Funston's office at Fort Sam Houston those early days of the Perishing advance who will not soon forget the face of the general as he reluctantly admitted the biplane, the wireless, and other deficiencies. "It's a bad record," he said. And when he said it there was no way in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, to get a word from or know anvil: ; about what was happening to those six or seven thousand Americans in the Chihua- j hua desert, mixing in with a lot of! scoundrels, compared to whom the old time Apache was a drawing room feminist. In all there are about twenty thousand men of our army along the border and with Pershing. If the W r ar Department wanted to put another twenty thousand force of trained soldiers in the field, it would be just about as easy as for Jonah to swallow a whale. Just to add to your comfort while doing the supposing turn, suppose that right now, when every available man and resource of the army is trying to catch one brigand in Mexico, some power—Asiatic or European—were to judge it an opportune time to make some impossible demand. What would you do? Villa and His Little Ways. As to Villa. We rightly hate Villa, this peon personification of "frightfulness." But he is considerable of a man in the elemental sense of the word, and he is not troubled at all by what Emerson termed the bugaboo of little minds—consistency. Sam Belden, the man who manages Carranza's legal affairs in this country, tells this incident of Villa.

' It was at the time when Madero, J backed by Villa, captured Juarez. During the fighting a Spaniard had j gone to the window of the second ! storey of his house with a ride and a 1 basket of cartridges. j As the Maderistas fought their way I through his street be sniped from j his window until he had a windrow | of dead Mederistas on the pavement ! in front of his house. Villa, after the capture, came ridjing by and saw the pile of his men j in the street. "Who lives in these houses?" he I asked, pointing to the adjoining j places, and was told the names, in- ' eluding that of the Spaniard. i A short time later the Spaniard, seeing that Madero was on top, has- ■ tened to call on the victor. | He embraced him in Mexican j fashion and admitted that while he I had been a Portiristo, from that i moment he was all for Madero. Madero, with that trusting folly | that was his undoing later, graceI fully received the Spaniard, officially pardoned him, anil introduced him to Mme. Madero, who was in the i group. Villa strode before the President | with a scowl. "You pardon this | scoundrel?" he said to Madero. "Very well, so do I then—this way," : and he fired a bullet from his six- ' shooter, taking oft the top of the I Spaniard's head and dewing the i company with blood. This Year. . . . Never. ! Will Villa be caught? Villa may be captured when you read this. We may be chasing him j next year. When I left Fort Sam Houston (last Wednesday 1 doubt if a'single Sman at headquarters had any "idea | that Villa could be had. But if President Wilson can supI ply troops enough to maintain a j safe line of communication, say from 400 to 800 miles long, if Carranza J should continue to acquiesce and if he should"-maintain control of his j war minister, General Obregon, and if Villa does not combine with enough men to stop Pershing or if Villa does not retreat down through Tehuantepec to Guatemala, or if Villa should be betrayed by some of his command, or if the Carranzistas should turn Villa and compel him to retreat again to the north, and if Villa really has a broken leg, and if we do not find that the expedition results in a general war with Mexico, and if a miracle happens—Villa will j be captured. But you must bear in mind that ! miracles do happen in Mexico. ! Getting Out. j What miracle will happen about getting out of Mexico? General Angeles, formerly with I Villa and Mexico's best artillery exI pert, who is now operating a batj tery of rapid milking cows on a i dairy farm near El Paso, says that I if Pershing's column stays in Mexii co a few weeks longer it will mean j war. First Chief Carranza is testy and perplexed; his minor officials keep roaring about gringos over-running I the country and he makes rhetorical orations about Mexico's sacred sovereignty; he wants us to clean up ' Villa, and he wants to see us humiliated. Ilis ambitions conflict. Most of the real authorities on Mexico agrc. that the end will never come until an American force sel- ■ eets a president, seats him in that j big chair in the Hall of the Ambassadors in the National Palace, which hasn't held a real man since Don Porfirio died, and punctuates his inauguration with American bullets and bayonets. Then we can come out with peace and honour, just as we came back from Cuba, and may come back from Nicaragua and Haiti. The "Pork Barrel." As to. the United States army. If the records were examined they would likely show that the Senators and Congressmen in districts and Stales where army posts exist were useful in increasing the cost of maintenance of the army, regardless of advancement of the morale of the men or efficiency of the organisation. General Funston lately received a violent telegram from the mayor of a border town, because the General had ordered the transfer of a regiment "for the good of the service" to another town. "You have ordered this regiment transferred just three days before the men are lo be paid off," ran the telegram, or in similar phrases; "this is an outrage on the commercial interests of the town and is deeply resented; unless you countermand your orders the matter will be taken up by our people in Washing-, ton." ! This is but one of scores of diatribes from active minds who were j directing avid hands into the pork barrel. I General Funston, being a soldier,! held to the order he had given) and told the mayor to go to hell. The mayor did go lo Washington with his complaints, and it is I within the limits of human endur- i ance that they may have some efl'ecl in further embarrassing one of the j corkingest brave soldiers and gallant j gentlemen of the noble lot of such who have honoured the United States army by their services.