Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1918. BRITAIN’S PART PRAISED.

Hokitika Guardian, 24 October 1918, Page 2

Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1918. BRITAIN’S PART PRAISED.

A writer in a'Philadelphia paper has a good word to say for Britain’s part in the war. The part which Britain, and notably England, has played in this great war, is far from being understood, as yet in the world at. large. The tribute from the United States writer, therefore, is the more timely and deserved. It opens with some very complimentary references to the gallant prut Great Britain has performed in the war and then proceeds:—“England was under obligation to send some eighty thou sand soldiers to help the French. The Kaiser measuring their honour by his own thought they would perfunctorily, and literally redeem this pledge, and let it' go at that. Hence his remark ! about tlu'ir ‘“contemptible little army. 1 ' The fact is that Great Britain alone lnm sent- on land and sea a total of six and a quarter millions. Her Empire has added two and a quarter mil- , lions more to this. Over eight millions instead of eighty thou- ) sand—a hundred in place of one That is the British way. When ■ the United States sends fifteen millions we will have done as well—but not till then. England was no more a military nation than America when the war began. She learned to fight- by fighting—and dying. We are profiting ’ to-day by her tragic experiences. Thou- ; sands of American lads will come homo ; to us alive and whole because thousands of our blood-brothers from the British Tsles have been killed and mutilated—and have taught us how to escape. Britain made her armies while France and her own navy held the gap, and then she poured them into France and Flanders by the million to fight- hack tin* eruption of Cave Men that threatened to submerge civilisation. What- the English have done in this war is too recent to need recapitulation. They gradually took over greater and greater sections of the front. They first fought defensive actions with all the dogged courage for which the British are famous—then they created that early turn in the tide which released the series of Allied offensives that finally sent the Germans back to the Hindenburg line—and beyond. They rose to the rank of a full military partner of France, and there is no higher rank. For ail this they paid. There is hardly a- homo in Great Britain which does not have its unvisited grave in France or Belgium—not a sPreet on which the permanently maimed do not limp to unaccustomed tasks. And the figures show that the percentage of casualties from the Mother Country exceeds the percentage from the oversea Dominions, thus disposing of one of the vilest, meanest, most dastardly lies of the whole Satanic German propoganda which charged that tho English were putting their colonies and their Allies in. the forefront of the battle. Lord Northoliffe estimates their killed alone at 900,000! England’s contributions outside the Western front have been worthy of a great nation, even if they stood alone. Tier Navy lias kept the seas free for the commerce and the troop transports of the Allied World. It has bottled up the German Navy from tho first. Her ships have coaled, fed and munitioned the French—brought legions nml food supplies from the Seven Seas. Wo are proud of our own swift shipment of troops to the firing line during the days of the soul-shaking danger this last- summer; but well over half of them went- in British bottoms convoyed by British warships. Then where havp not the British fought? The Suez was in danger.lt was the British that protected it. There were German naval stations in the Pacific. The British mopped them up. Russia asked her help by way of thg Dardanelles. The British tried to give it. Intervention was needed on the Tigris. The British supplied it. The British were- at -Saloniea. British ships were in tho Adriatic. Tho British Colonial troops freed Africa from the Germans. British diplomacy ‘steadied the Moslem world when the Turkish Sultan and his Sheik-ul-Islam proclaimed a holy war. The British to-dav are moving south from Archangel and are at Yladivostock. Britain financed the Allied nations till wo came in to share the titanic, task. Her industries have clothed, munitioned and supplied them in various vital j ways. Tho Germans sav that she has j “prolonged the war.” By that they mean that she has kept up the fighting spirit of the Allies and supported their moral. The Briton is a dour fighter and knows no end to a struggle save victory’ or death. He never fights a limited liability war—he goes in with his whole soul. The day that British khaki appeared upon the battlefields of France it was decreed that thero. could be but one of two ends to this conflict—the collapse of the British Empire or the final failure of Germany’s dream for world conquest. But no one, save the German Intelligence Department, lias known half of what Britain lias done. When it comes to self-laudation the British arc the poorest advertisers the world has ever seen.” Praise so generous ns the foregoing is acceptable only \ ' because it is deserved. The part Britain J has played has involved a great sacrifice, 1

but. the dawn of a complete- victory is at hand, and has made the sacrifice worth while both for now and hereafter. Tfsitory will accord Great- Britain lmr rightful place for the part performed in the war.