BY LAND AND SEA

Hokitika Guardian, 18 September 1920, Page 4

BY LAND AND SEA

On the outbreak of war Mr E. Hilton Young, M.P., offered his services to the Admiralty, and on the. shortest of notice found himself on board the Iron Duke at Scapa Flow decoding endless messages in cipher. Thus began a varied naval career, which he has described in “By Land and Sea.” Deciphering was a dull business, and existence in the Flow was uneventful. Tho only breaks in the monotony were caused by periodical submarine scares, which provided several very likely interludes. Mr Young was appalled at the prospect of bending over a code book “for the duration,” and became an executive officer—a pukka sailor. In 1915 be was appointed to the staff of the British naval mission in Serbia, and proceeded to his destination by way of Saloniea. He gives a vivid picture of this cosmopolitan town, with its babel of tongues, its notices printed in five different characters, its never-ceasing rumours, its cohorts of spies, who did not even take the trouble to conceal their operations. Ho shared in the last defence of Belgrade, and when it fell crossed the Albanian mountains to Medun, a port on the Adriatic, where be supervised the embarkation of Serbian refugees. We have heard something of the horrors of that terrible hegira; Mr Young’s grim chronicle makes us realise more fully the sufferings of ’ the retreating army and of the civilians who crowded the snow-ohoked defiles. Their ghastly anabasis was one of the most dreadful incidents in the war; Medua “held for a time more misery and grief, more fortitude and endurance, than so small a place can ever have held before.” Next Mr Young was commissioned to H.M.S. Centaur, the flagship of Admiral Tyrwhitt’s Harwich force, and made the acquaintance of one who struck him as the spirit of the navy incarnate, “a big petty officer, with the physique of a bull, and a head that would have fitted a leader of condottieri in the middle ages—broad brow, square jaw, straight nose that had for its straightness a suggestion of the hawk about it. It is a type that is peculiar to the navy, and it is the tru.e naval type. The beaming round-faced idiot of the comic paper and the music hall is a conventional libel. He would make a very bad casuist, I thought, to argue with a conscientious objector; but he is a very good petty officer. He would keep the gun in action till the ship sank under him, and he would make the gun’s crew stay too.; lie has them in the hollow of his hand. It is good to be in tlie same boat with him.” Mr Yq.ung’s confidence was justified by. the event. The Centaur took part in several engaglhents in which, thanks to tho condottieri and his kind, she gave a great deal more than she got.

Mr Young left the Centaur to join a naval siege gun battery on the dunes of Nieuport. When volunteers were called for for an operation tvliose nature was undisclosed, but which was de- ' dared to he “very pink” he reported for special service. This turned out to he the attack upon Zeebrugge ; the author was one of the party on the Vindictive, and his account of the preparations for, and the conduct of the affair is intensely interesting. He was wounded, and no sooner had he recovered than lie was sent up to Murmansk to take.charge of an armoured train. The Murmansk front was quite unlike any other theatre. It consisted simply and solely of a railway line which ran through a dense forest, so that “we seemed to be. travelling all the time at the bottom of n cutting, the sides of which were made not of earth but of the boughs of trees.” The forest was quite impenetrable ; Mr Young hardly saw an open space the whole time ho was with the railway force. It was impossible to walk save on the clearing of the liue, and that was about ten yards wide only. “We lived and fought on that line as if it had been a causeway. The war in'

Flanders had length, breadth, and thickness into the bowels of the earth, but this war in Russia had one dimension only—that of length.” Mi; Young describes the desultory lighting with the Gorman officered Bolsheviks, and observes the authorities at homo had a very scanty appreciation of the obstacles the expedition encountered, the distances it had to cover, and the difficulties of campaigning in so inhospitable a [region. He addcjd that while the troops of all nationalities bad endured their hardships uncomplainingly, the news of the Armistice gave rise to a spirit of discontent. “How could it have been otherwise. Who could wonder if men cursed the ill-luck that brought them, alter four years of war, to the only, corner of the woj-ld, a remote and inclement corner in which there was no peace.”