THE ABANDONED HEROES.

Wairoa Bell, Volume XXXI, Issue 215, 11 January 1918, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE ABANDONED HEROES.

Australia’s deplorable decision means the abandonment of ha r soldiers. All those who voted with the “Noes” have said, in effect, that so far as they are concerned, those gallant fellows whom Mr. Hughes has described as “100,000 of fih© bravest men tjhat God ever ■saw,” may be left to die like dogs. Australians cheered them when they left, bade them God-speed, declared til© cause for which they were going to fight to be just, crowned them rvitb flowers, and applauded them with cheers. Yet now, in the hour of greatest danger, Australia .has virtually deserted them. This is no flight of morbid imagination. It is, unhappily, merely a statement of fact. The “Noes” were deaf to the voices hich cam© to them from the trenches. Sergeant H. A. Richards, who enlisted a few days after the outbreak of war, and left Sydney with the original 4th Battalion, is typical of thousands of Australians who are with him in the firing line to-day. Writing on the fourth of November, just after th e battle of Polygon Wood, to one of his brothers £a returned soldier), Sergt. Richards said : “ It is not very often I squeak, hut lately it has been getting rather too strenuous.- Don’t think for a moment that I am ‘squibbing it,’ because such is not the case. Only I don’t feel that I can last much longer, and the reason is that I have just about worked myself to a standstill. But it seems to me, from present appearances, that one will have to stick it out, as the reinforcements are not forthcoming to give one a chance of a spell.” What will they think to-day, those, brave men who are fighting for 1-s.ifs-tralia, who—as the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth has put it—-have been wounded again and again, patched up, and returned to the trenches; who have faced death in a thousand shapes, and stand by Cambrai to-day, compelled to hold the line against the desperate onrush of the German legions reinforced from Russia, their ranks shorn of full strength, unrested and unfitted to withstand the awful strain —what will they think to-day?