AUSTRALIANS IN FRANCE

Hokitika Guardian, 28 June 1929, Page 2

AUSTRALIANS IN FRANCE

GALLANTRY AND SACRIFICE How many New Zealanders now — eleven years since the war ended —still base their knowledge of it on the “war news”? How many of the young generation have a knowledge of the Great War, in which their fathers and brothers fought, as comprehensive, as their knowledge of, say, the Peninsular War? The “war news” was inaccurate and miserably inadequate, and necessarily so. Without reading some such work as Captain Bean’s history of Australia’s war effort, the latest volume of which was recently published, no-body whether soldier or civilian can possibly have an. outline idea of the scope and nature of the conflict, of the relative importance of individual engagements and of the heroism and sacrifice of the fighters. In his latest volume Captain Bean recounts the doings of the Australian Imperial Force in the year 1916 —the training and reorganisation of the expeditionary force*in Egypt, the transporting of the armies to France, the move to the front, and the plunge into the bloody .conflict on the Sonune, which was so utterly different from Gallipoli, on which the Aivaacs had already won their spurs. Armentieres, Messines, Fromelles, Pozieres, Mouquet Farm, Flers—what poignant memories are stirred by these names! DEMOCRATIC AND HUMAN. Tin's history is intended to be, and succeeds in being, a democratic, human history. -Its ..author is interested in strategy, butOie is interested far more in men. He has endeavoured to “ reconstruct the fighting from the point of view of the front line.” Having compared the reports and dispatches (which are the straw with which many another historian makes his bricks) with the information obtained from men who fought in the front line, lie concluded that

“Dispatches written after a fight are rarely accurate in detail. Those movements which a leader states to have been the result of his orders have very often been made before those orders arrived, their true causes having been accident, the pressure of the enemy, the initiative of some junior offieer, eleven the tactical sense of the troops themselves.”

In other words, Captain Bonn lielieves “the true credit for famous achievements in war —as in politics—■ lies often with unknown subordinates.” With this belief firmly held, he has done his utmost to ensure that the “unknown subordinates” of the A.T.F. at least shall now be given their due. To this end, with prodigious patient and industry, lie lias described every engagement, every trench raid, in detail, mentioning scores and hundreds of names in each, and at the foot of each

page be lias - added a “thumbnail sketch ” of every man ho has mention-

ed—his; name, rank, unit, civil occupation, birthplace, .home town, age, and his ultimate late. Not content with this, ho lias gone to the Imperial German Archives at Potsdam, and there caned information of extraordinary interest, showing how the enemy (irepared for, fought and suffered in many conflicts with the Australians.

All this detail might be tedious,- but it can never be tedious to a colonial reader. In these pages one learns for the first, time just bow citizen soldiers closely akin to our own (a number of them, indeed, were New Zealanders) stood up to the strain of battles which were among the fiercest of the whole war. One realises, too. that the wartime reputation of the Australians as fighters was fully deserved, and one learns that under the terrible strain of prolonged and intense bombardments at Pozieres even such whipcord material as the Australians all but snapped. WERE THE TACTICS WRONG ? The official British communique on the battle of Fromelles, which was what the troops called a “ sideshow,” said: “ Yesterday evening, south of Armentieres, we carried out some important raids on a front of tuo miles, in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners, were captured.” The truth was that “the sth (A*■> tralian) Division had lost in one night’s sharp fighting 5533 officers and men, and the 61st Division (which was of less strength) 1547. . . . The German loss appears to have been under 1500.” The contention of Captain Bean and others is that in this action and in others which followed it, notably the agonising struggle for Pozieres Heights, the slaughter could not have been justified even if all the objectives had been gained. The attacks were invariably made on fronts which were too narrow, and the Australians came to dread and detest them. One gallant officer, in the last j letter before his death, wrote of the “murder” of many of bis friends “ through the incompetence, callousness and personal vanity of those high in authority.” This, Captain Bean considers, “ is evidence, not indeed of the literal truth of his words, but of something much amiss in the higher leadership.”

FINE TRIBUTE TO HAIG. Criticism of Field-Marshal Haig’s tactics in 1916 is not new, and the layman cannot bo certain it is justified, but the honesty of Captain Bean’s purpose in giving expression to it is shown by his general estimate of the Com-mander-in-Chief. He finds Haig deficient in two important qualities—quick imagination and sure judgment of subordinates—but “ lie bail the capacity of learning by bis mistakes and the moral courage to change his attitude when the need became clear to him •’ : he was resolute, deeply skilled in technique, loyal to all. and lie eschewed intrigue. “ Above all, lie was practic-

ally alone in his magnificent capacity of serving his country on occasion by

quk'tiy passing on to rivals credit due to himself without uttering a syllable, then rtf afterwards, to betray the extent of his sacrifice.”