OUR CITIZEN ARMY.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 145998, 3 December 1917, Page 5

OUR CITIZEN ARMY.

MEN BEYOND PRAISE. A MIRACLE OF THE WAR. British Headquarters, Sept, 11. The outstanding fact of the recent fighting hero has been tho same as it was on tho Somme last year, namely, the amazing quality oL_>iir men. One talks about it less now than one did a year ago, because then our new Armies were untried, and their gallantry came, not, indeed, unexpectedly, but confirming our highest hopes., as a revelation. But now the thing is familiar. We know how tho men are going to fight anywhere and everywhere. Instances of individual heroism are still passed about; but they are little compared with the heroism of the mass, of which one thinks it necessary to speak no more than in mentioning a rose is it necessary to dwell upon its scent and hues and shape. COMMANDERS’ PRAISE. <r. Talking to a Divisional Commander recently 1 asked about the general behaviour of his mon. “Oh,” ho said, “they’re rippers; absolute toppers, every man of them!” His men camo chiefly from certain manufacturing districts in the North of England. Within the last two days an Army Commander, replying to the same question, broke out: —“Oh, they’re extraordinarily good; couldn’t be better, no matter where they come from.” And an Army Commander’s men come from most parts of the Empire. Another Divisional Commander had spoken for some time of the splendid way Iris men howl fought; “And the way they stiok by each other,” he had said, “is simply magnificent.” They are troops of mixed English county regiments, and have suffered since the war began as heavy losses as any division in the Army. “Are they tired?” I asked. “Do they want peace?” “Not a bad peace,” was the quick reply, “not one of them > They understand now what this war is about, which at the beginning they didn’t.” From jay own observation, I believe this to bo true. Tired ? Of course, menget tired individually, physically and mentally tired. But the British Army is very stern and set in its purpose'now. Many men there are undoubtedly who fight for the love of fighting; but in the mass our men fight now not from adventurousness, not from discipline, but because they propose to win this war, and know that, for the world’s sake, win it they must. “It might have been a very nice war,” said a sergeant, “if the Germans would have fought it right.” But those illusions are gone. Tho German has not fought it right; and it is a vile and dreadful war; and our men know it now, and know that there is nothing else to do but crush the Power which made it so.

16 DIVISIONS AGAINST ONE CORPS Some of the hardest fighting of the summer —perhaps of the war —has been going on of late in the Westhoek-Zan-voorde region, about tho Ypres-Menin road. The Germans evidently regard this as a crucial point in their positions and have flung in troops against us recklessly. I believe that one of our corps has had no fewer than 16 divisions against it during the month of August. The struggle has been desperate, and we have made headway only very slowly. Within the last few days I have talked with an officer who by virtue of his position should be thoroughly qualified to speak on the subject, and Tie told mo that never had he known men come out of battle in better spirits than those who have been fighting there. “Bad?” they say. “Yes, it’s been pretty bad; but my! we’ve killed a lot of Germans!” And they undoubtedly have. A never ceasing subject of curiosity with me when talking to officers of almost every grade is the quality of the new drafts; and I have never yet met a case where the officer was not satisfied with his latest drafts and apprehensive ab«jt his next. This has been so for two- years. Just as the old Regular Army feared for the Territorials and the first Territorials feared for all the later men, so each successive layer of the Newest fears for the layer that will comei next. And the last layer gets kneaded into the lump and, with it, shares the old fears as to the quality of those who will be coming after. So it goes on —and look at them! Who would say whether the men of this company swinging along the road had been out here for two months or two years? It is not a very full company, for the men are “coming out” ; but mark the copper-bronze faces and the confidence and rhythm of the march. And the young officer at their head: Goodness knows what he was two years ago, but to-day he is an officer and a soldier every inch of him, fit for men to follow.

Another company passes them on the road, going the other way, fuller In strength and without the stains of recent battle on the uniforms. But the faces are as bronzed and the tread is as firm. Tlie two pass in silence with friendly measuring eyes —those just coming out from tile doors of death and those just passing in—but there is no criticism in the gaze of the one nor envy or apprehension in that of the other; neither pride of duty well done on the one side, nor fear of failure to do it on the other.

THE ASSURANCE OF COMPETENCE And the long trains of guns and artillery transport; you can stand and, as they pass slowly, study each individual man, note the way they sit their horses, the evidence of the care that is taken of the animals, the confidence of the drivers, the serene assurance of his own competence which stamps the bearing of every man. Who were they before the war? How long have they been here? Is it credible that they were ever anything but soldiers?. Where have all the dispatch riders come from, these men whom all_ the Army admires, who day and night in all Weathers, soaking wet or covered with grime, flash by with tight-set lips and steady eyes, through all the dust and swirl of traffic? One knew there were young men in Britain who loved such daredevil work-as this; but where have we found enough of them, so that on the roads of half France one is never out of earshot of the machine-gun rattle of their engines? And the transport drivers, how comes it that they are all brave, all possessed of an equal and supreme contempt for shells when they have a job to do? If you ask an infantryman or gunner who was the bravest man he has seen he will speak probably not of another infantryman or gunner in the exercise of his ordinary duties, but of some runner who carried messages, some engineer or “signals” who had the care of telephone or telegraph , wires, or some stretcher-bearer. So it

is -all' through the Arrays aud it- iff impossible not to wonder daily how thesemen hid their qualities before the war,, and what has shaped them to what they are to-day.

A week ago, on the coast, just behind the reach of shells, I watched men out “in rest” take their horses into the sea, naked men on bareback horses, flesh to flesh. There were more than 300 of them; and they went out in a great bow-shaped line cantering, shouting, racing, through the long shallow of the incoming tide till the water rose from hoof to fetlock and fetlock to belly and belly to back, until nothing was to be seen but the horses’ heads and part of the neck and men awash to the waiste. And then they came back in one glorious race for homo, a mass of black shining skin and whirling white arms, all veiled in a smother of foam in which the sun struck rainbows. It was immensely good for the horses; but, oh ! how good it was for the men! But how came they all to ride, each one like some strange amphibious centaur? What were they before, and how far have they not travelled from their old ways of life and thought? By how much are they not better men ?

Two stretcher-bearers were pointed out to me as having been particularly gallant. I spoke to them, and found that one had sat on a stool in an insurance office before the war, anti the other was a farm hand. One of our most brilliant airmen was, I believe, in a haberdasher’s shop. Of a certain group of six officers, only one was a Regular soldier, in the Guards, one was in the Indian Civil Service, one a master at a great school, one a professional musician, one a solicitor in bis father’s office, one a journalist of a family of journalists. The most frightful of our newest engine of war was invented by the musical critic of a rural weekly paper. However much may be written and said of our “citizen Army,” 1 do not think that anyone who has not grown to know it out here can grasp what our .Army really is in all its amazing intricacy and volume, its silcneo and its competence, and the incredible welding of all materials into one shape and colour. I do not think that anyone who dons not see it and ponder on it here can visualise, what it is that is being wrought in the British peoples or what the manhood of the Empire will be like when it is turned back to its thousand normal channels when the great end comes. I often wish, too, that all those who grieve could come out here and sec. Nothing, of course, can console—not even the proud companionship of grief at homo and tho knowledge that “lie” died a hero. But I have often wished that each mourner could come and, mirrored in tho others, see what the fallen one looked like when he went about his work, what good fellows his comrades were, of what a splendid whole he was part, and with what amplitude all pride is justified.

It is. of course, not possible; nor can we who are out here interpret it. But the time will come when it will bo realised more fully that it can bo now, when grief will grow less and pride he greater, and above all sense of loss will be the sense of gratitude, not merely for the things that have been achieved, but for the new-found qualities of the peoples of the Empire.