SPIRIT OF ARMY

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20094, 14 November 1939, Page 12

SPIRIT OF ARMY

BRITONS IN FRANCE A NEW GENERATION VISIT BY SIR P. GIBBS LONDON, Nov. 1. Writing from France to the Daily Sketch, Sir Philip Gibbs says:—Out here with the British Army, a generation younger than those with whom I once walked, I feel, writing my first dispatch from the Western Front, that I have just slipped back into 1918. I traversed villages yesterday whose names are burned into the pages of our own history because of great battles. It was wet, cold and dank. Men in billets were lying on.straw in barns belonging to farmhouses with manure heaps in the front yard. The same sour stench of the old days! Like A Rip Van Winkle “Any rats?" I asked one man. He grinned and said: "They frisk around. We don’t take much notice. It’s nice and snug. We manage to keep warm.” I rode in a tank across the fields, the very fields where once lay the bodies of German soldiers.

From a hill I saw one morning in the last war a cavalry charge in a snowstorm. Mechanised troops now occupy the hill. They had never heard of that light, and 'stared at me incredulously when I told them about it.

It makes one feel like a Rip Van Winkle returning to the scenes of youth.

Anguish Over The Folly of Life

It is comforting to meet here and there senior officers who belonged to that other world. We talked like ghosts remembering ghosts about great battles in which the flower of British youth was mown down.

One said to me: "I can hardly bring myself to believe it may happen all over again. Yesterday I went to one of the war cemeteries and stood there and felt a kind of rage and a kind of anguish that the folly of life has caught us again and that the sons of those who died are going to be the victims of another evil spell. Can it be possible, or is it a nightmare from which we all will wake up?”

Like myself, lie had .seen all those battalions of youths whose immortal spirit seems to haunt every field, farmstead and village live again in these battalions of younger men —their sons —now holding the line out here. Army Highly Efficient They are a good crowd, putting up with discomforts cheerfully—not so tough perhaps as the old crowd I knew, probably more educated and more intelligent, faces not so square, more finely-cut; town-bred, they belong to a mechanised age, a mechanised army, but they have the same stuff in them. The officers are no different from those of the last war. The army seems to me to be highly efficient, and keen, but still has the amateur spirit which is deep in the nation’s character. I cannot imagine the German army behaving in the same informal, humorous way.