SERVIANS WONDERFUL ARMY.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 338, 9 November 1915, Page 3

SERVIANS WONDERFUL ARMY.

IRISHMEN OF THE BALKAJNS. (Published in the "Times"). A correspondent of the Times who was lately in Servia says that a most remarkable thing is the capacity of the Servian soldier to live and fight gaily witih. practically nothing to eat. "It is a peasant army," the correspondent adds, " and in the best of times its food is of the simplest bread, potatoes, and uurded milk, and rarely, except on feast days, a little meat. Bread is the staff of life in the real sense.

"For four years Servia has been almost continually at war. It is difficult for the women, with all the men in the ranks, to keep up the agriculture, and the country has become poor to a degree not known in years of bad crops in congested districts of Ireland. The soldiers have been inured to a life of extreme privation. While ngjhting last winter it was their toughness and their ability to withstand hardships that gave them tjhe advantage over the Austrians." I have repatedly heard Servian officers say that • their men had not eaten for two days. "When the country was knee-deep in mud the Servian soldiers pushed on

i utterly careless of the commissariat. They simply hunted the Austrians day and night, not giving them a moment's rest. Only men of iron, to whom semistarvation was almost a normal condition, could have done it, yet the Servians' laugfhter-loving disposition has remained unspoiled. "Every Briton soon discovers that the Servian is absurdly like the Irishman. When he is not laughing he is generally singing. Careless, long-limb-ed, lean, deep-cjhested, of kindly manner, with cheeks bronzed, the Servian is an ideal fighting man. When wounded he is almost insensible to pain, and he takes death lightly. TJhe nurses and doctors have unbounded admiration for him. •' L'he chief weakness of Servia's mili-ta-v position is that there are no reserves. T|he. entire fighting of the country—almost its '.mr.ire manhood —is already in the ranks.''