A LETTER TO FRITZ

Taihape Daily Times, 30 October 1917, Page 2

A LETTER TO FRITZ

The following humorous letter by “An Officer on Leave” appears in the London Daily Mail. who bids goodbye to the Ypres salient, in a humorous fashion to an imaginary Frtiz. Ho tells "Fritz” that the salient was "a good friend to him, but not always.” "You have probably not forgotten,” ho says, "that rainy October of 1914: when, amid mud and blood and anguish, it was born. Do you remember the scenes at Eoulers and Moorsiede and Monin, the dense columns of your enthusiastic comrades pressing forward from the capture of Antwerp, to drive a way through our silly little army, through the disorganised Bclgianr through the beaten French, to the Channel ports? Fritz, you were a good trier. You tried at Langemarek, to the north, at Zand voorde, to the south of Ypres, and along the Mein in road,to blast the passage to the sea. The Supreme War Lord, himself came up to Eoulers —or was it Monin? —to emphasise his Imperial command that the road to Calais must

be forced at all costs. You had the guns, you had the men, Fritz—many more guns and many more men than we; ‘but you didn’t get through!’ Your Westphalians and your Badeners and your Wurtemborgers and all the rest of them, came on in their thousands; your unfledged recruits advanced handto-hand; piping in their boys’ voices'your soldier songs; but you never reached the sea. Even your Guards, doing the parade step into battle along the Menin road, sent in as the supreme effort when all else had failed, aheieved no more than the rest of you against the haggard, dirty shadows of men who had fought without respite for nigh on a month. "I don’t want to buck, Fritz,” the writer continues, "because, God knows you nearly succeeded. You never realised until months afterwards, did you, how near you were to victory on October 31, 1914? The U-boat menace you talk so much about is not in it with the peril that threatened the British Empire between the hours of 2 and 3 o ’clock in the afternoon of that day when you had punched a hole in the First Division line and thousands of you were surging forward to flow through the gap. But we foiled you again, Fritz; the Worcesters went in with the bayonet and recaptured Gheluvelt, and the road to Calais was ‘na poo. ’ ’

The "Officer on Leave,” assures "Fritz” that in spite of lift awful losses lie did not do so badly; "You managed to collar all the rising ground (such as it is in these flat Flanders plains) the Pilkcm Eidge, the Mess-ines-Wytschactc Eidge, north and south of Ypres you bent our line back so far that at the end of this great battle it .ras like a tightly strung bow spanned about Ypres. You had the high ground, the dry ground; we had the plain, the water and the mud. You could dig nice, secure trenches, which you cleverly managed to drain into ours; we had to build up, painfully, by night, earthworks, which you, having the observation, promptly spotted and demolished with your guns in the morn-

mg. It must have been a bully time for .1 on. Fritz. You held all the trumps,' superiority of position, of observation, of shells. You were as safe as a cruel little boy sitting on a high wall and chucking stones at an invalid in a chair in the garden belojw. No wonder you used your lines in front of pres as a training school for young gunner officers! 'But wc held on, Fritz. You think " 0 aie a stupid race. Perhaps we are, if that means we do not know when we are beaten. And you did your best, in your ingenious, plodding way, to make life in the salient a hell on earth for our men. You shelled us by night; you .'shelled us by day You pumped shrapnel into us filing up to the trenches; you scattered high explosive shells, over all the roads; you bombarded the villages behind the lines you lobbed those infernal and ' terriiying 'Minnies’ into our frout line, or searched it up and down with noisy’ black five-point-nines. And when you had blown down the parapet so toilfully built in the night your snipers laid on the gaps, and, Fritz, they took their toll.” . This ckvcr ends by saying: “’VUdI, the old salient is dead, so they tell mo. The North and South- Irish, by whose squabbles you thought to profit. the English, and the Australians and New Zealanders buried it with bell, book and candle. 'And, Fritz, old friend, it looks as though the tables were going to be turned on you. Your little MessincsAVytschaete salient is flattened out; the guns which were wont to make life so disagreeable for us are either in our hands or are buried under tons of earth. Now the laugh Ls with us. And, Fritz, wc have a lot to pay back. There Js scarcely a Briton but has a relative or friend who is slumbering somewhere between Bocsiughe and the Hill I of Ivcmmcl. Fritz, I think you’re “in for it! ”,