A MODEL ARMY.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 21 March 1917, Page 3

A MODEL ARMY.

AND WELL-OILED MACHINE. PRAISE FOE NEW ZEALANDERS. "The whole organisation of the New ZealandcTS in Great Britain and France," says Lord Northcliffe, "strikes mc 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 arc led by capable officers, Imperial smd other, who mostly knew them personally 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 fairi 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 depleted of their best men. Since writing the foregoing impressions I have talked with many of the men about thein 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 arc all pleased with what I may call the New Zealand roundi —the arrival in England, the training, and the New Zealand hospitals at Brockcnhurst, in the New Forest, and at Walton, which have between them accomodation fox 2000 patients. MASTER TUNNELLERS.

I asked a very highly placed English officer his opinion as to the qualities- in wtiich the New Zcalanders 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 I will not recapitulate it, but he mentioned something of which I had not heard — the! New Zealand tunnelling company which was allotted for work in a special area. In tunnelling work they had 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 when 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 the '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 splendid contrast to the levied masses of unwilling Poles, Czechs, Turks, Euthenes, Slovaks, and the rest whom Prussia has bullied into her trenches.