SIDELIGHTS ON THE WAR

New Zealand Tablet, 8 February 1917, Page 17

SIDELIGHTS ON THE WAR

. '■'■■■ f ■ ?4 4v4 /r •. •;■;;• v/;- 4 .. 4-•. 4444 .:•:■ ;44-.4 :>/.--. : I'— r‘ " GENERAL. - “" '' , . . ■ . ■ . ••■.!:,■ ■■■!.-:■■■ , ...’: ■■■ ■..■■ . ■ ■ • ; y.- Sergeants Brennan and Redmond and Privates ( S’Callaghan and O’Brien, of the Irish Guards, were re"V:4- cently -decorated with the D.C.M. by the Duke of Con- - i naught at an inspection of the regiment. An Italian decree places under Government con- -' ; trol the consumption of . meat from January 1. On Thursday, and Friday of each week all sale of meat f, v will bo ? prohibited. . ' Lieut. H. E. Bulbeck, Royal Fusiliers, killed in action in November, came of an old Hampshire Catholic family, the name appearing in the Recusant Roll of that county in the second year of the reign of James :. r 4 I. (says the London Tahiti). His great-grandfather, J Dr. John Bulbeck, was a fellow-collegian of Daniel ' 40,’Connell; and was one of the thirty-two Douai students who suffered the full term of imprisonment after the seizure of the college at the French Revolution. ",,4.4 Lieut. Lucian Chabord, of the 54th Battalion of 4 Chasseurs Alpins, who, after being mentioned three times in dispatches and gaining the military medal of the Legion of Honor, fell gloriously on the field of £~t'l honor, was a young Jesuit scholastic born in the diocese r of Chambery. The official mention of his death is in ‘1 the following terms: —‘An officer of remarkable cour- ; V age and dash, his moral and professional value were above all praise. A real leader of men, and a model of courage, conscience,, and devotedness. Fell glor--4 iously for France whilst viewing from the top of his trench the ground over which he was a moment later to lead his men.’ A Canadian exchange announces that the Arch-' . bishops and Bishops of Ontario, at their recent halfyearly meeting at Toronto, gave serious attention to the question of supplying more chaplains for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. ‘ At present there are 41 Catholic chaplains attached to the Canadian armies, but of this insufficient number some are obliged to - return home, broken in health from the fact that they 4 have been on active service since the war began and , recently an urgent request was received for five more chaplains for immediate service overseas. Seized of the seriousness of the situation, the Bishops decided to make every effort to release more ' of their diocesan clergy, although every diocese is undermanned, and to hold no missions during the continuance of the war other than those already arranged for.’ The Captain Mackenzie mentioned in the account of the anti-Ally disturbances in Athens in Saturday’s papers (says the Glasgow Observer of December 16), is the novelist Compton Mackenzie, who was recently ' received into the Catholic Church. Capt. Mackenzie has been in the East for many months, and has seen service in Gallipoli. He was in Athens as Chief of the British Intelligence Department there. He escaped from the Athens mob by a ruse. All lovers of literature will rejoice to hear of his escape. He is one of a group- of young " writers who interrupted brilliant careers at the outbreak of the war to serve with the British forces in the East. When war broke out Comp- ' ton Mackenzie was writing novels in his retreat at Capri. The war has interrupted the composition of his long and delicately elaborated Sinister Street, a sensitive reflection of modern life in London and Oxford. For a time he acted as war correspondent at Gallipoli. A young, French priest stretcher-bearer, in a letter home from the Front at Verdun, dated August 28, writes:—‘My letters are getting less and less frequent because of the frenzied uninterrupted work we have to carry on at the front. My time is absorbed in transS port work. The affair of Verdun has revolutionised -A the technique of war. We have at last decided to carry it on scientifically like our enemies. . . Motor and horse waggons come, along in thousands in unbroken _ succession, with light and heavy guns, shells of } all’ . calibres, trunks ; of ' trees, fopff, forage, petrolf planks,

and rails. All these things have to be dumped down, 4 and the waggons, refilled. 4 All. available men,, of every tribe, tongue, and people are. combined and brigaded 4; into a vast I organisation. y One must ■ see -with= one’s own ■ ' eyes to understand what an amount of material a hun- & 'died determined’ men can handle in a day of sixteen or . eighteen hours.’ ■ ] ; ; ; 4' | f • - . 1 .• ' ' ' > ' . ' ‘ _ . THE LATE SERGEANT PATRICK DEVINE. The following N letter,- dated November 18, 1916, has been received by Mr, Thos. Devine, Howe streetj Dunedin, giving particulars' of : the sad death of his son, Sergeant Patrick Devine. Some details of deceased’s short life appeared in our issue of October 26 —• .; . ;; / - Though at a somewhat late date, I write to convey to you my sincere sympathy, and the sympathy of all my battery, in the death of your son, Sergeant Devine, killed in action on October 10, 1916. Sergeant Devine was with me right through from the formation of the battery, and was always a capable gun sergeant, and very popular with his - men. ~ He had been in action with the guns for five weeks without a rest,, and always carried out his duties cheerfully, and encouraged his men to do the same. • He was -killed by an explosion of ammunition, during the shelling of the battery position. A fragment struck him in the body, causing a severe wound. He was at once got awav to the cover of a trench near by, where I put a dressing on the wound, before he was taken to the dressing station'; but although he made a game fight for it, he died on the way. One of my officers went down to the dressing-station, and made 1 all- arrangements for the funeral. Your , son was buried next day near Lonqueval, together with one of my officers, who was killed at the same time, and the grave was marked by a cross made by his comrades in the battery. Your son’s personal effects were collected by his friend. Bombardier McDonald, and were posted to you. I trust they have reached you safely. I regret that I was unable to write to you sooner, but. the continued stress of constant action rendered it impossible while in that locality, and since leaving, between moving and taking up new positions, we have had our time fully occupied. v ■ '■ ; -•;> -Assuring you once move of our deep sympathy, Believe me, yours very sincerely, R. Miles, Capt. R.N.Z.A., O.C. 15th Battery. - NEGRO ARMIES. i The suggestion of Mr. Winston Churchill that we should raise a great army of black troops in Nigeria ready for the campaign of 1917, and the statement that 4 the French are already employing nearly 100,000 men from Africa in-the lines in France, calls attention to the use which has been made in the past of the fighting qualities of the negro. The French have always recognised the splendid : 4 fighting qualities of the -blacks. -• The number of Sengalese in the French army had risen to 22,000 as far back as 1911. _4 It was .in that, year , that the raising x of 300,000 blacks was strongly. advocated by French military authorities, who suggested that they should be used in the coming European "struggle, to redress the . balance which the greater population of Germany gave to the Kaiser’s army. Of course, says the Star, the Zouaves, Turcos, and Spahis have all been employed in the French wars from the time of the 'Crimeabut these natives of Tunis and Algeria are not really blacks. They are Arabs, and are not open to the reproach of color to which the negro is subject. . w During the American Civil War . many, negro regiments were raised, and when the war ended in 1866 there were still 123, negro soldiers in the Federal armies, though after the"war their numbers were greatly . reduced. ... There are still, several negro -cavalry regiments in the tJpited States army, , ,

r Lord ; Wolseley had a great opinion of the military value of the negroes as soldiers. ,_ The black regiments " in the Egyptian army, he once said, were the best ; . portion of ; it, and the West . Indian regiments of the <' British army, when they were recruited from the newlyliberated slaves, men fresh from the : West African forests, were splendid fighting material. ■ - REMARKABLE DEATH FROM SHOCK. ■. A story was' told me the other day (writes the Paris correspondent of the Catholic Times) that brings home to us .the minor tragedies of the war. In an Alsatian family a mother and her two sons had French sympathies, and when the war broke out one son made straight for the frontier and enlisted in the French army. His brother intended to do likewise, but, owing ■ to some delay, was unable to carry out his project and had to take service in Germany. He fought in Alsace, then at Verdun, and, having gone home on leave, discovered that his brother was a prisoner in a German camp and obtained permission to ' go and see him. He broke unannounced upon the unfortunate soldier, who, no doubt weakened by suffering and ill-health, started violently when he saw his brother in German -/ uniform, uttered a cry, - and fell dead ! Our German fighting man returned to his regiment, deeply.. impressed by what had taken place, and secretly resolved to do his best to join the French army. One night, close to Biaches, the young friend who told me the tale saw a German soldier, unarmed and dripping with water, being taken to headquarters. There he told his story in excellent French, and related how, under cover ox the darkness, he swam across the Somme and gave himself up as a prisoner. Since his brother’s death, he found it impossible to remain in the German lines! My informant added that he has now joined a company of Alsatians, who cannot be employed at the front, where, if taken, they would be shot as deserters, yet whose peculiar position entitles them to be treated otherwise than the ordinary German prisoners. ALARM IN THE GERMAN GENERAL STAFF. The reappearance of Mr. Philip Gibbs’s descriptive articles on the Somme fighting may be taken as a welcome announcement that he is back again at British Headquarters, restored to health. In a recent article in the Daily Telegraph he deals with the effect of our artillery on the moral of the enemy. Of the German Staff he writes: —• * The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to all the welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the cold scientific spirit with which they regard the problem of war. The agony of the individual soldier would not trouble them. There is no war without agony. But the psychology of masses of men had to be considered, because it affects the efficiency of the machine. As I shall show, the German General Staff on the Western front were becoming seriously alarmed by the declining moral of their infantry under the increasing strain of the British attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it. But they could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who were lying on the battlefields, nor the maimed men who were being carried back to the dressing stations, nor to bring back the prisoners taken in droves by the French and British troops. Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thiepval, and the German

debacle at Beaumont Hamel, the enemy’s command was already filled - with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of, its ",fighting strength, and was compelled to adopt new expedients for increasing ; the number of its divisions. . It was forced to ■; withdraw troops badly heeded on other fronts, and, as I shall point out, the successive, shocks of the British offensive reached as far as Germany itself, so that the whole of its recruiting system had to be revised to fill up the gaps torn out of the German ranks.’ v, / ———. ■ ;,~v . THE ROSARY AT THE FRONT. It is almost unspeakable what consolation the Catholic soldiers of the different nationalities, facing the battle, have drawn from the Rosary. There is something simple and sweet about that devotion it revives faith and enkindles fervor just as it did when the sainted Dominic first taught it to the multitudes as they swayed toward the Albigensian heresy. No Catholic soldier will come back from this terrible war with but an increased love and reverence for the beads. An officer writes in the London Chronicle * At one side of the hill where the men lay a fife and drum band was playing, well-known Irish airs, and they were listened to with keen appreciation and followed by cheers. At the same time, these men, so gay and light-hearted, are filled with the deepest and purest feelings of religion. On the particular night the writer refers to, just as the camp fires were dying down and the men were preparing, to wrap themselves in their coats for the rest which' they might be able to snatch, an officer came over the hill and down .to the centre of the camp. It was the Catholic chaplaina devoted priest who had been with the Irish troops in Ireland, in England, and in France, and whose never-ceasing work is keenly appreciated by all ranks. In a moment he was surrounded by the men. They came to him without orders— came gladly and willingly, and they hailed his visit with- delight. -He spoke to them in the simple, homely language which they liked. It was a simple yet most moving address, and deeply affected the soldiers. When the chaplain had finished his address he signed to the men to kneel, and administered to them the General . Absolution given in times of emergency.. The vast majority of the men present knelt, and those of other faiths stood by in attitudes of reverent respect. The chaplain then asked the men to recite with him the Rosary. It was most wonderful, the effect produced as hundreds of voices repeated the prayers and recited the words, “Pray for us now and at the hour of death. Amen.”—the hour of death now approaching on swift wings for many a gallant son of the “ould land.”