DUST OF THE PAST

Taranaki Daily News, 29 December 1934, Page 11 (Supplement)

DUST OF THE PAST

TAY BRIDGE DISASTER

(By

“Historicus.”)

The traveller by the East Coast rail route to the North of Scotland crosses the shallow estuary of the Tay by a bridge over two miles long and sees from the right hand side of his carriage a line of mussel-encrusted pillars of stone and brickwork, some single, some double but all slim and slight in construction. These pillars, rising through the waters of the Firth of Tay and based on its sands, carried the first .Tay Bridge, which was opened for traffic in 1877. Slight though they seem, they never gave way, and a proposal was lately made to use them as the supports of a road bridge across the estuary. The steel superstructure which they originally carried, a structure strutted out to bear two lines of railway, and, according to modem engineering standards, of light construction has vanished. The portions nearer the shores of Fife and Forfar have been dismantled. The middle spans vanished bodily in the Tay Bridge disaster of Dec. 28, 1879 when a great gale blew them away with a night express which was in transit upon it. If popular legend be correct, neither carriages nor passengers were seen again. A signalman at the south end of the bridge watched the rear lights of the train till they were half across then lost sight of them. How the train fell no one knows, nor even how many passengers were in it. The victims numbered about 80, but one or two men who were not on that train are suspected to have made the disaster a pretext for disappearing from their homes and friends. Because of the Tay Bridge disaster British engineers have always since made their great bridges far stronger than do the Americans. The Forth Bridge is reputed to be four or five times as strong as it need be, and much the same is true of the' Sydney Bridge. But as a result British engineers have never had such a mishap as befell the designers of the Quebec bridge which fell into the St. Lawrence when half completed and had to be begun anew.

Rally Against 'lmperialism.” On December 22, 1917, the Russian Bolshevist delegates came to the railway junction of Brest Litovsk in Poland to meet Herr Von Kuhlmann, the German diplomatist, Count Czemin, the AustroHungarian minister, and the representatives of the German High Command, chief of which was General Hoffman. The Bolshevist delegates,' deliberately dirty in attire and countenance were led by Trotsky and Kameneff. A few months before some of them had been sent by the Germans through Germany from Switzerland to Russia' in a sealed railway carriage, with the intention that they would break up the national unity of Russia and end its military effort. The German plan had succeeded; the Russian armies had crumbled, and the. Russian workers had been persuaded that their enemies were not the Germans but their own middle and upper classes. Yet, to the surprise of the Germans, the Bolshevists did not come to BrestLitovsk either submissive or grateful. On their arrival they distributed revolutionary handbills and astounded the stolid German sentries and railway men by haranguing them about the worldwide solidarity of the proletariat. At the council table they lit their pipes, puffed smoke with boorish malice into the faces of the German generals, and took the opportunity to call on the workers of the world to rally against “Imperialism.” Then they presented their proposals—no annexations, no indemnities, no economic boycotts, and recognition of the rights of small nationalities. The Germans tried to look as though they took this seriously and accepted with the qualification that the rights of small nationalities must be interpreted to mean the right of Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic States to remain under German supervision. The Bolsheviks boggled until the Germans marched their armies to Kief, to Odessa and nearly to Petrograd. Trotsky and his colleagues capitulated on March 3, 1918, and Russia was not only out of the war but reduced to economic serfdom to Germany. Isolated Rumania had to accept like terms and the Germans had only the Western Front tc deal with. They failed there and found in their extremity that the poison which the Bolshevists had instilled at Brest-Litovsk had corrupted German armies.

Army Demobilisation. On December 20, 1918, Sir Eric Geddes was appointed to take charge of and to reorganise the arrangements for demobilisation of men. from the fighting forces of the United Kingdom. On the same day a Soldiers and Workmen’s Council claiming to speak for all Germany and practically in control of it decreed at Berlin the socialisation of all German industries. There is no association between the two events but the chance coincidence recalls a danger from which Great Britain narrowly escaped. The German and Russian revolutions began with mutinies in the army and navy which almost immediately made the civil Governments impotent. How many people remember that the indignation of British troops at the slow and apparently haphazard process qf demobilisation led after the Armistice to mutinies at Dover, Folkestone and other camps near London and to the appearance at the War Office of crowds of soldiers in full equipment who objected to rejoining their units on the Rhine when men who had joined up later were returning to civil life? How many people recall that the Guards were brought back from Cologne to London because the Government felt it must have a force in the capital which it could trust, the London police .being permeated by a political trade union movement and the New Armies refusing to believe that enlistment for the “duration of the war” meant retention in the ranks till the formal ratification of peace. The situation was made worse by the secret fear of the military authorities that if demobilisation were too swift the Germans might rally and fight again in the spring when the Americans had gone home. It had been complicated by the taking in the United Kingdom on December 14, 1918 of a general election in which the soldiers and sailors were invited to vote. But worst of all was the fact that the demobilisation of 4,000,000 men was attempted on a plan prepared by the now happily defunct Ministry of Reconstruction. Under this plan “pivotal men” in business and men in “key industries” were to leave the colours first. These were the men who had been called up last and the veterans of three or four years war were furious. Newspapers protested that men who were home on leave and whose employers asked for them should not have to return to their units. The Government agreed to release them. Headquarters in France retorted by stopping leave save under strict conditions. The bungling authorities almost deserved to see a Soliders’ Council in occupation of Downing Street. But the commonsense of the British soldier-citizen stood the strain.