AN ENGLISH M.P.'S LETTER

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2382, 11 February 1915, Page 9

AN ENGLISH M.P.'S LETTER

SIDELIGHTS ON THE WAR. (To the Editor.) Sir,—The following extract from a letter written to me by a well-known English Liberal, M.P., may be of interest to some of your readers:— "It was, alas! my brother 's youngest boy who was killed the very first day near Mons. He was in the —th Hussars,. and was scouting, and was ambushed by the Germans in a wood on his way back. The sad part Is that he was only just married, and left his wife and. a baby a month old exactly one week before. E. R. (major) is doing excellently, and has been mentioned in. dispatches. He was never so fit in his life, and has put on a stone! He was in the trenches in the desperate fighting before Ypres, where 7000 cavalry kept off 150,000 'Germans for several days—a line of men Eve yards apart in the trenches, with no supports and no reserves. I supposevone of the finest and most desperate things ever done. They say he is the life and soul of his men. What grand work the Fleet is doing, and what a lot it means in the war! I expect it will do more to finish the war than all the armies! I wish I could think the end was near. The daily toll of life is terrible;' one has to harden oneself to it for the sake of the cause; but the strain in the early days was horrible. For my part. I felt the responsibility of assenting to the war to be a heavy one, but I had no doubt we were right in going in, and if possible Ihavo still less doubt about it now. "The temper and tone of the country ■. on. the whole has been very good. It has been taken very seriously, and calmly, and confidently. I do regret a little, and more than a little, that some enthusiastic people in their anxiety to encourage 'recruiting have been representing to the world at large that there was backwardness about the men here. It is quite untrue, and Kitchener has said publicly more than once fiat he is getting all the men he wants. Indeed, at the end of September they came in so much faster than Ui9y could be dealt with that he had to choke them off by raising the standard. Now (Christmas time) they are coming in about 30,000 a week, and lie cannot deal with more. has been able to get home from the front twice on leave, four days and eight days, including Christmas. We are pretty well in it as a family; is out with the R.H.A., is to go in the next lot, -— has joined the R.A.M.C, and is training at King's College Hospital, and is shortly going out with the Red.' Cross. ■' "I fear it is going to be a long while yet before we come to the very difficult job of making a stable settlement, as you and all of us. hope. The changes must, I think, follow racial lines, but how to keep from a recrudescence of this overweening and brutal militarism m Germany is not so easy to see. If they would dismiss' the Hohonzollern gang and started a republic, I should have more hope, but I do not see the sheep-like 'German of civil' life doing that—sheep-like I mean in the ingrain" ed habit of obedience to officials. "Any real representative Government would, I think, make for peace. And on that head I am enormously impressed by the change in the French nation under 40 years of self-government. The national character seems to have been profoundly modified since 1870. Sobriety and restraint characterises them now in this time of trial as never before. "I think the attitude of the Dominions, India, and even the smallest colony, has given me more satisfaction' in this war than anything else. And how unable the 'Germans are to understand it!"—l ami etc.,. G.E.A. Wellington, February 10, 1915.