MAN WHO HAS A RIGHT TO TALK.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 268, 20 April 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

MAN WHO HAS A RIGHT TO TALK.

WHAT A REAL SOLDIER SAYS ABOUT PEACE. "FIGHT TILL THE ENEMY ;8 BEATEN." Somewhere in France. People in "soft jobs" like" myself ought to bo guarded when they talk about peace. To digress a moment: a soft job out here is not easy to define. When one was in the front line trenches, one thought of a job which kept one in tne s-hell-ndellfd village a thousand yards back as decidedly "cushy." When one was stationed in this same village, one thought of a man permanently inhabiting tho transport held, in the M.B. area (it Might Be- shelled; is, sometimes, but it is mcro bad luck there if you get one) as what the French call "embusque."

Appointed to a transport area job, one thought of tho divisional headquarters folk as faraway people who could iu>t sec tho war through a telescope. So, at the division, I suppose they thought of the corps; and so on, I imagine—l have not sampled life so far back —when you get to th© bedrock, the War Office you speak of a badged •'indispensable" with the blend of senuenvy and semi-scorn which one sums up in the words "soft job." On a point of personal explanation my job is betwixt and between—on the edge of the Might Be axea.

Any job in the war, I do not care whero you find it, is a soft, one compared with the infantryman's. Your kok out man on a Sea minesweeper gets chilly times. Your airman gets tho shrapnel rattling round aim. though you may not believe it, your administrative staff puts in a good fonir-teen-hour day most times. Wrap them up, all three, and you have not reached the sum of what an infantryman goes through for one and threepence a day.

THE INFANTRYMAN. So it is the infantryman who.'has a right to talk about whether we want peace. I want to tell you what an infantryman, a friend of mine, tliinks about it. When the war began ho had not to begin His soldiering. He had qualified as a marksman before age allowed him to qualify as a voter. On August i, 1914, he was in his place and knew his job. „ On August 4 1914. without a second s thought, he volunteered for foreign service anywhere, under any conditions, although it was not in his contract. He liated tho Germans then, whom he was going to fight, about as much as he hated the men ho rowed against, cr boxed against, swum against, or foiled with a neat pass at Rugby. When tho war was barely a month old he was in France. When be had time to read tho jvhieh was seldom he read things about the Germans that put them out of the category of sporting foes. He got in the trenches. Those were tile days when, as Mr. Lloyd George said, division extra on either side would have done the trick. Ho took his place in a ditch four feet de-op—and two feet of that was balf-frozen mud—and eight feet wide, with a parapet that would not have stopped the slug of an airgun. There were no communication trenches in those times. He just walked up to the trenches, overland, in the dark, didn't happen to meet a machine-gun bullet from the front or a sniper's bullet from behind (there were such things then; the trenches were not even continuous; the frost-bitten cavalry were holding Ypres at the time), and slipped into his trench.

ALWAYS CHEERY. Between him, in his particular bit of trench, and Calais there was not a man except the cooks and transport, a mile or two behind. (I wonder if the Germans knew.) His food was filthy. Shells came over that would have knocked the Tower of Loudon sideways. He saw his test pab shot beside him. He was verminous (and in civil life he was a rising young man, rather particular about his clothes). He could not wash for weeks. Yet I never heard him grouse. 1 never heard or saw a "fed-up" or nervy man in a trench for whom he had not a cheery word. He" had a year of this. Halfway through ho was in an attack that cost his regiment half its men and two-thirds of its officers. It was rather a mix up Napoleon and a senior wrangler coul.i not have sorted them out He and about sixteen of his regiment, who had a particular job to 'do, volunteered to stay up an "xtra day. Four came out. A few months later he wont through a four-day bombardment that cost his regiment * a third of its men —a regiment, by the way, that had never lost a trench and never attacked a trench it did not take.

Ho did not get the D.C.M. or any otnor kind of medal. There were a good many like him, and no't many medals. After a year of it he took a commission. Not a "soft" one. He joined a tough, newly-formed iniantry regiment that wanted licking into shape—badly. He licked them. He had seen more war than most of the other officers had read about. In tho few months at home his men very raw: half of them had been called up and they found the Army rather irksome —got to know him as a man who. whrn he. said a thing, expected—and meant —to see it done.

GOOD KNOltiH! ; . I He came out again, and in a tew | months was in the biggest fight there ever has Invn. in this or any other war. j His colonel, major, and adjutant, and al! the company commanders were killed | or wounded early on. He was a lieutenant acting captain, then. He wm- t maudod his battalion for the rest of the fight, and the divisonal commander w.i.s told. He received rather a nice not* about it later. Ho is a major now. He is still in tho mud. Daily ho wades nlongthe front, line. He lias Wn out here for nearly two years in all. He has no medals, gilt strips, or fancy bodges. For the past seven or eight months he has hard, lv spent a night out of the range ol KiielU. He is beginning to draw about two-thirds'of Ihe money ho would have been making if be had not thrown up his job and come out to war. He says, "Gn on with tho war until the enemv if* beaten. That is good enough, isn't it? M. P.