SEASON FOR RUSSIAN FAILURES.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 13 August 1917, Page 6

SEASON FOR RUSSIAN FAILURES.

Russian motor, truck administration, or mal-administration, is weird beyond belief. In it rests the secret of the in-and-out performances of the Russian armies. From a variety of causes ,little improvement can be expected in the future. And for that reason Russia is not considered a dependable factor in the war. In that country, so vast that it covers an appreciable share of the world’s surface, populated ‘with teeming millions of people, there were but ten thousand motor, vehicles before the war, fewer than in any prosperous middle-class American city (says a San Francisco correspondent). Of tnis number 400 were a certain light, small, pleasure car. There was but one motor factory in the country, and that made ponderous touring ears and no motor trucks. Russia has a battle line of thousands cf miles on fronts varying as widely as is possible in climatic conditions. It is sub-tronical and desert on the south, arctic and ice-field on the north. There are mountains, plains, swamps, glaciers, jungles; gravel roads, stone roads, corduroy roads, swamp trails, upland paths; good roads, poor roads, no roads at all. Methods of transportation are as primitive as the people. There are very few railroads; shaggy little horses hitched to long tiny shaft waggons; dog teams, goat teams, fiat bottomed sleighs from the steppes; trains of gigantic camels —Ivan, the Russian peasant is more or less familiar with them all and gets action of a sort with them. But the motor truck was beyond his comprehension. There are thousands of square miles where a motor car has never been seen, where the people would run away from one, loudly declaring it to be of the devil. Even the motor cycle and the bicycle are strange and unheard of in Russia’s "back of beyond.” Yet the red wave of war rolled up on Russia and her millions of Ivans marched out to roll it back. They had to be fed, to be clothed, to be transported. Arms had to be placed in their hands. The motor truck it was peculiarly needed for these tasks as it was needed on no other battle front. The motor trucks were bought belter skelter, frenetically, all makes, in every market, at any price. The next question was where to get the drivers. Eussia has few adventurers with motor experience in her armies, so there

were no teachers. And Ivan is chuckle headed about machinery. But supplies had to be carried, and someone had to do the driving. Ivan was ragged out of Siberia by the scruff of the neck, flung on the grim, rab monster, and curtly ordered: “Harness him, ride him, drive him!” About every base for months after the Avar began Avere scores of motor wrecks in every conceivable position and degree of completeness. There were "head-on” and "tail-ends” and "broadsides,” and grand jams in which three of even more cars participated. On many of them were the dark brown stains AA-hich showed that Ivan had paid for his ignorance with his life.