SIAM SONG OF PAGEANTRY

Waikato Times, Volume 116, Issue 19462, 29 December 1934, Page 11 (Supplement)

SIAM SONG OF PAGEANTRY

.(Robert Bermays in Jo] SAW THE WAR through all the stages,” writes ■ Mr Frederick Palmer in “With My Own Eyes,” 1 “from bands playing, flags waving, swords **“ flashing at the head of impetuous charges under the canopy of black powder smoke, to the regulated advance of the drab automatons at funeral pace across No Man’s Land.” There lies the fascination of Mr Palmer’s book. Though it covers little more than twenty years of war, it is a Survey of War Down The Ages. Mr Palmer saw what he calls "the swan song of Pageantry.” He had his first “smell of powder,” as it was so gaily called at the turn of the century, as a boy of twenty-four in the frontier scrap between the Greeks and the Turks in 1897. He saw one of the first battles of nursery strategy where volleys are fired by a front rank kneeling and a second line standing, witli rows of cannon muzzles behind and cavalry swinging into position in their rear to turn at the appropriate moment a defeat into a rout: —“This battle, in its mass action ?it close quarters, in its tactics generally, was nearer to that of Pharsalia between Caesar and Pompey, where the horizon met the plain, than to the Somme, Verdun, the struggles in Ypres salient, and Meuse-Argonne or even tlie Marne.” The Turks won the day, but fifty modern mafchineguns with a longer range than the, Greek cannon could have scattered the Turkish columns.” It was true that the Greeks had one machine-gun. It was a gift to the Crown Prince by sympathisers with his cause. 'But It had been left behind at Headquarters. War was fought according to recognised rules, and none disputed it as the inevitable concomitant of human relationship. Shepherds tended their flocks between .opposing battle-lines: — -Under the bursts of shrapnel, which had killed several of his flock, an old white-bearded shepherd—in ids homespun coat and leggings, and untanned sheepskin mantle, such as his ancestors had worn from the dawn of history—carried a wounded lamb, with one hand held cupped against his side. Undisturbed by the shellbursts of his baptism of fire—without any analysis of his feelings, lam sure—that taxpayer for the spectacle Which I had been witnessing employed the crook In his other hand to round up. the strays of his frightened flock, which lie was driving, out of the range of the lightnings of batlie lightning's which were to him, as to his. forbears foi countless generations, an inevitable part of the human struggle no less than storms, drought, brigand tolls from his fold and sheep-ticks.” Mr Palmer saw imperialism in its noonday as Kipling knew and loved it. He experienced the social elysium of tlie English middle classes in the Treaty Ports of the ’nineties, when “a clerk from Clapham, Tooting, -or any other chimney-pot suburb of London, Manchester, cr Liverpool, - . Became a Majestic White Man representing the might of the British’ Empire. He, too, knocked the coolies out of his way with his stick as he passed, along Hie bund. . . . Dinners averaged seven or eight heavy courses; the Russians having ten, or twenty being, more accurate, if you included the meal of hors d’oeuvres before the meal at table.” * Then came the earthquake of tlie Boxer Rebellion, from which the old order never recovered: — “Hordes, gathering recruits as they 'had advanced, and living off the land and, moved as an avenging human storm Without exception they would kill all the "foreign devils”: all the white evangels who had taught false religion, the medical missionaries who had used the knife on children and given false medicine, the lordly ministers and their famine's, the overbearing merchants, ail the authors of China’s misery and despoilment who had angered the China’s earth spirits by stringing , telegraph wires that carried words through the air and brought droughts and crop failures. Detachments of the Chinese Army, which had beeri drilled by foreign officers, had joined trie Boxers, bringing to the attack on the foreigners the modern artillery and high-powered rifles which the foreign makers bad sold to tlie Chinese Government. •Imperialism at last was reaping what it bad sown. There followed that strange march of the outraged Powers to the relief of their Legations. The Japanese, having Hie largest force, led the march; the Russians with the nexr- largest followed: and after them came the Americans and the British; then tlie other nations. It was Lhe first time the Japanese had been in action with Hie li,.ct-class Powers, and their 'efficiency and their hardihood even proved that they were not the least enemy with which China had to reckon. The absorption of Manchukuo was more than thirty years ahead, hut the foundations for it were laid in that Gruelling March from Tslentsln to Peking to save the women and children. Incidentally, the jealousies and backbiting by the Allies in this campaign in 1900 illustrate how extraordinarily hazardous would have been effective intervention by the chief League Powers in 1932.

WARS DURING TWO DECADES.

ihn o’ London.) _ The 'Russo-Japanese War came, and. Mr Palmer saw that too. Ten years later he left America again to see the death grapple of the old Empires in Europe. His narrative of the e'arly days of the conflict is particularly interesting because it is that of a sympathiser with the Allied cause behind the enemy lines. He went to Belgium with Mr Hoover on his mission’of relief. It is a memorable picture that he gives of the old Landsturm German Reservists who- were policing the streets: — “In face of the scorn of the population, of the flashes of hate from the eyes of women who pulled their skirts to one side as they passed the sentries, the elderly Germans occasionally exhibited a plaintive desire for a more neighbourly spirit. Many of the sentries being fathers themselves, and grandfathers too, and homesick, they would have liked to play with the Belgian children, hut a B-elgian mother would no more have permitted that than allow her young to dr ink poison. German monsters cut off baby’s arms!” He Explodes the Famous Bryce Report, which invested tlie atrocity propaganda with the aura of legal authority. The Germans--are by nature ruthless and insensitive, but their actions in Belgium were not very different from any other army in a similar position. That may be true. It does not really answer the indictment. The invasion itself, like the modern concentration camps, was the crime. . The atrocity was that it ever took place. There was, however," one phase of war in which Germany appeared in a far more favourable light' than ourselves. They soon grew tired of “ hate ”• on the Home Front. Mr Palmer recalls that lie talked English at the Opera in Berlin with complete impunity. "Some people looked around when they heard us talking English, but not censoriously.” There would have been a riot if the German language had been heard at an English theatre at that time. “ Germans mentioned that Shakespeare was being played in Berlin, but German Opera was forbidden in Paris and London. ‘ What had music and art to do with war?’ they asked.” In 1915 Mr Palmer became an American correspondent in France, and when the United States came into the War he was the chief censor of the American Expeditionary Force. As such he came into intimate contact with General Pershing, who stands out in these pages as one of the few military men in the World War who were at once realists and human beings. He Knew What He Was ‘1 Up Against ” In the earliest days of the United States intervention, he cut through Joffre’s pretence that we needed only to show the flag and through all the vapourings about only financial and commercial aid and the skulls of America’s might as enough to dishearten the Germans—in his despatch saying that at the least we must have at least half a million men in France and he was planning* for two million or even three million. We should not ‘fool ourselves as the Italians and tlie Rumanians had in the fever of a mad rush of initial wariemotion; we should not send out a new army into premature offensives, and wear out our strength piecemeal as the British new Army had had to do. He would have no hate propaganda against the enemy. “ Let us -see if we can get on without it,” he told Mr Palmer. For President Wilson, op the other hand, Mr Palmer believes that there is little to be said. He lost his head in the adulation of his triumphant tour of Europe: President Wilson didn’t even visit the Argonne-Meuse battlefield to see what the men who' had volunteered, or been drafted from civil life, bad endured in defeating the enemy so that lie could make his peace without victory. Instead he rode in triumph through the capitals; he knew the intoxications of the huzzahs of the crowd, who were thinking; “ Wilson, you will see that we are paid for the deaths of our sons and all we have suffered.” Altogether, it is a book 1 Refreshingly Sane and Moderate, and one that will be read by all who want to appreciate the reasons that led the United Stales into the War, and the magnitude of her efforts when she was in'it. My only quarrel witli Mr Palmer is that he does not seem to realise sufficiently that a war correspondent has inevitably a soft job compared with the combatant soldier. It is, of course, /as Mr Palmer points out, a trying position to he under fire and not to he able to retaliate, and obviously grave risks are taken by any enterprising and conscientious reporter. But the fact remains "that the correspondents lived in relatively comfortable surroundings, l free from rats and the ceaseless shriek of the shells, and that at any rate they are most of them to-day alive and well—which is more than can he said for millions whose doings they so brilliantly chronicled. It is only fair to add in conclusion that Mr Palmer is at pains to expose throughout the cruelty and stupidity tof war. “ Tlie cannon fodder," he says on the last page, has learned something from the World War. " It knows that there is no glory in going into the • teeth of the thresher.”