THE TALL NEW ZEALANDERS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1694, 3 April 1917, Page 4

THE TALL NEW ZEALANDERS.

THEIR LIFE AT THE FRONT. The following is a continuation of the article contributed to the Daily Mail by Lord Northeliffe, and published in our issue of Thursday last, describing life at the front with the New Zealand Forces; — We sometimes do not realise at home that here are two million men living their lives, and that when they are out of the trenches they need plenty of newspapers, magazines, periodicals, kinematographs, Y.M.C.A. huts, sign-songs, and football. These they possess. The New Zealanders occupy a fair stretch of the front line, and their billets, rest camps, lines of communication, and bases go a long way back. They therefore form a New Zealand world of their own, and the average French peasant, who had never heard of a New Zealander before, knows all about them now, and likes them. For the war has placed New Zealand “on the map,” as the Americans say, with a prominence that could not have been obtained by any other means. TEACHERS AND LEARNERS. The New Zealanders like to learn, I find, especially if the teacher quickly ’demonstrates that he is a master of what he is talking about. Lecturing is a great feature of the war. Wherever you go behind the fighting lines are lecturers, teaching the construction and throwing of bombs, the making of trenches, and the use of this or that weapon. I attended a New Zealand lecture on the Lewis machine gun, a favourite weapon with Haig’s armies. The mechanism, use, mishaps, and repair of the gun were being lucidly explained by an expert. The most skilful conjurer would have been gratified if any of his antics received from a packed audience as much attention as this highly technical exposition of a new weapon. We have lately read a great deal of the line work of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles in Egypt. If anything could have saved the disastrous- expedition in Gallipoli it would have been the fine work of (lie Australians, New Zealanders, and the 2f)th Division, but it was not until the Battle of the Somme « I hat the wearers of the fern received their chance of taking part in a great success, and there it was that their preliminary military training at home was so useful. There are those who think that the training in New Zealand is too extended and that it would he wiser to cut down the period of (raining there, finishing it in the actual war zone, where everyone learns at twice the pace, and learns also the newest devices and manoeuvres, of which at least several are invented each month.

These Dominion forces do not go straight to France; they come first to England, where they have a very hard 14 weeks’ drill, cross the Channel, and attend one of the war schools I have already described where again they get their practice in real gas, bombs, and grenades. The only complaint 1 hear about them from their teachers was that they had not had the right kind of bayonet practice when they arrived. I should have thought that this, and quick-loading, could have been taught on board the transports. A Scot tish instructor with whom I discussed the Dominion troops —Canadian as well as Australasian —continued what I had heard before, that when there is anything important to be learnt and the man who is teaching is an adept, they arc attention itself, but if by any chance, as in the early days of these wonderful schools of intensive soldier culture, inefficient teachers were provided, they would show their discontent by apathy and criticism. A HOMOGENEOUS FORCE. The whole organisation of the New Zealanders in Great Britain and France strikes me as being a very well-oiled machine, partly because they are homogeneous in race, principally because of their previous military training, and also because they are led by capable officers, Imperial and other, who mostly knew them personally in New Zealand before they came to the war. Large as it is, the New Zealand Army is, of course, only a microcosm of Haig’s wonderful force: but a student of the New Zealanders gets a very fair idea of what a model British Army should be, how it should be provided with a sufficient number of officers trained to the difficult task of Staff and intelligence work, how the officers should be to some extent promoted from non-coms., and how care should be exercised that the ranks of the non-coms, be not entirely depleMASTER TUNNELLEES. I asked a very highly placed English officer his opinion as to the qualities in which the New Zealanders shine. He summed them up by saying that as individual fighters they were equal to any in France, He spoke particularly well of their work on the Somme, which has been described so often that 1 will not reted of their best men.

Since writing the foregoing impressions I have talked with many of the men about their general arrangements, and found them satisfied as to food, hospitals, and promotion. Everyone, of course, wants a commission,'but obviously everyone cannot get a commission, .They are all pleased with what I may call the New Zealand round —the arrival in England, the training, and the New Zealand hospitals at Brockenhurst in the New Forest and at Walton, which have between them

accommodation for 2,000 patients, capitulate it; but he mentioned something of which I had not heard —the New Zealand tunnelling company which was allotted for work in a special areat In tunnelling work they have outwitted the Germans every time. Many of them perfected their skill in the coal and gold mines of New Zealand, and there are well-trained engineers at their head. They can not only out- • tunnel the Germans, but there is no case on record in which the Germans have surprised the British troops provided with New Zealand tunnellers. What this means in peace of mind to an army can only be imagined by those who, like myself, have been at points in the line where there was grave anxiety as to whether or not mysterious sounds heard sometimes by microphone, sometimes by the more simple miners’ device of placing the head in a bucket of water and listening, were the approach of subterranean Huns.

When it is remembered that the population of both islands of New Zealand is less than that of any large London postal district —it is only a little over a million all told —it will be understood that this live and finely organised band of Antipodean Crusaders constitutes an offering which is a splendid contrast to the levied masses of unwilling Poles, Czechs, Turks, Ruthenes, Slovaks, and the rest whom Prussia has bullied into her trenches.