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Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 45, 17 July 1915, Page 11

Professor Spenser Wilkinson, Professor of Military History at Oxford, gives his hopes for victory in this war based on the kind of men who are now second lieutenants. "The fate of the country is in the hands of the new second lieutenants," he writes in the "Westminster Gazette." "Generally speaking, they have worked' with a will. They have bad some needless difficulties to overcome. They have not had all the help which might have been given them. But they are the kind cf young men who know how to help themselves and who overcome difficulties. I think they are better men, with more resource and keeneer witfci, than thdir German counterpart®, and therefore that their platoons will be more effective as fighting bodies than the German platoons. That is the basis of my hopes for victory."

The removing of bullets, according to Mr H. S. Souttar, a. surgeon with recent war experience, is not an operation which is advisable unless in exceptional circumstances: The mere presence of a bullet inside the body will of itself do no harm at all. The old idea that.it will cause infection died long ago. . . . We now know that, provided' they are clean, we can introduce steel plates, silver wires, silver nets, into the body without causing any trouble at all, and a bullet is no worse than anyol these. It is a- matter in which the public are very largely to' blame, for they consider that unless the bullet has been removed the surgeon has not done his job. Unless he has some specific reason for it, 1 know that the surgeon who removes a bullet does not know his work. It may be the mark of a Scottish ancestry," adds Mr Souttar, "but if ever I get a bulet in my own anatomy, I shall keep it,"

An Auckland Field Artillery Officer, writing en route between Gallipoli and Egypt, says that, compared with the infantry, the casualties among the gunners have been few, although the batteries were heavily bombarded at the landing and bombedl by "Taubes." Says he: "It was a hot shop—and will be. The din was frightful, and the firing was heard fifty miles away. The most pitiful sight was the drifting waterlogged snips' boats which 'never got there' with their loads of infantry. The colonies have cause to be proud of the infantry. The positions stormed, resemble a combination of the cliffs around Takapuna and those up about Kauri Point."

The Gallipoli Peninsula has been the stage of dramatic events age after age, ever since it was the Thracian Chersonese. Athens first colonised it about 2500 years ago. Herodbtus records that the Dolonkiam Thracians, who inhabited the peninsula., secured Athenian protection against their neighbours, the Absinthians, who inhabited, the modern Enos and its hinterland. Probably the Dolonkians thought of Athens because the Athenians had long before occupied Sigeum, on the Asiatic side, the modern Kum Kale region. But Herodotus tells a more romantic story. The Dolonkians, he says, consulted the Delphic oracle, which bade them choose as their protector the first man who should offer them hospitality. For days they tramped on, and nobody offered! any. At last they saw Miltiades sitting outsidle his house at Athens, and he invited them in. So they took him with them, and be saved them by walling off the isthmus of Bulair, where the isthmian forts of the Turk now stand.