UNCENSORED WAR MEMORIES.

Hokitika Guardian, 8 May 1920, Page 4

UNCENSORED WAR MEMORIES.

MR GIBBS’S TRAGIC BOOK

Mr Philip Gibbs, well known as a war correspondent who saw the whole struggle in France, in “Realities of War” gives his uncensored impressions of the greatest conflict in history and of tho behavious of tbe British soldier in it. It is a book which is written with passion and emotion; it stirs the heart and chokes the throat; it ‘‘fascinates and is intolerable,” like that terrible fresco of the great Master in tho Sixtino Chapel. It is, at the same time, an epic of our race, for it sets forth for future generations what our soldiers suffered and achieved in words that often burn with flame.

One does not blame. A writing man, who was an observer and recorder, like myself, does not sit in judgment. He lias no right to judge. He merely cries out “O God; O God!” in remembrance of all that agony and waste of splendid boys who loved life and died. As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this tragic diama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me. I wont to my billet in an old monastery and sat there in the darkness, my window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-dashes, and said, “O God, give us victory tomorrow, if that may help us to tile end. Q Christ, have pity on our boys.” But it was not to be. Year after year the struggle continued, till at last, Maidenly and almost unexpectedly, came tbe end. PEN PORTRAITS. There are pictures of most of tbe generals. Of Lord Haig, Mr Gibbs says: Me was intensely shy and reserved, shrinking from jniblicity in a morbid way and holding himself aloof from the human side of war. He was constitutionally unable to make a dramatic gesture before a multitude, or to say easy, stirring tilings to officers and men whom he reviewed.

•Of General Currie, the great Canadian soldier:

He out clean to tbe heart of things, ruthlessly like a surgeon, and as I watched that man, immense in bulk, with a heavy, thoughtful face and stern eyes that softened a little when .he smiled, I thought of him as Oliver Cromwell. This Real Estate Agent (as he was before lie took to soldiering) was undoubtedly a man of strong ability, free from those trammels of red tape and ira'. dition which swathed round so many of our own leaders.

He gives a grim, account of what happened when our Army was short of shells and of high-explosive shells: Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer telephone messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being shelled to pieces by long-range howitzers, or from engineers whose working parties were being sniped to death by German field guns, or from a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could not deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a certain trench and piling up tile casualties. It was hard to say, “Sorry! we’ve got to go slow with ammunition.” HIDING THE TRUTH.

He indulges in more than one fierce outburst against the Censorship and the policy of .hiding the truth:

It would have been better to lot tbe people know more of tbe truth of what was happening in France and Flanders —the truth of tragedy, instead of carefully camouflaged communiques,, biding the losses, ignoring the deeds of famous regiments, veiling all the drama of that early fighting by a deliberate screen of mystery, though all was known to the enemy. It was fear of their own people, not of tbe enemy, which guided the rules of the Censorship. And this policy of concealment brought great bitterness among the men in torment in France against the seeming callousness of civilians who believed all was well and war a lively form of sport:

The men came back (from leave) with a curious kind of hatred of England, because the people tnere seemed so callous of their suffering, so utterly without understanding, so “damned cheerful.” They hated the smiling women in the streets. They desired tlyit profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get the Germans to send Zeppe lins to England—to make the pom pie know what war meant. “Over there” in Flanders:

That Invisible Man was wielding a scythe which had no mercy for unripe wheat. . . . “What’s it like hero?” “It’s Hell The devils blow

up mines to make things worse.” One of tho officers had spoken th me privately. ’ “I’m afraid of losing my nerve before the men. The shelling is bad enough, but it’s the mining business that wears one’s nerve to shreds. One never knows.”

In tho autumn of 1915, that slow and terrible autumn which shattered so many hopes: Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trendies arid wet in their dug-outs. They slept in soaking clothes,