PATHOS OF A LETTER.

Taihape Daily Times, 12 November 1917, Page 3

PATHOS OF A LETTER.

AN OLD SOLDIER'S MEMORY OF

PaoT FiGHTS. What are the feelings of the old campaigners when, after giving their blood and sweat to capture ground, they look back with poignant mem- * cry? Something of tjais is described in the following’letter from a soldier to a friend: —“I suppose it would seem nothing to other people, but you, who here with us through all those dismal months—will one ever forget those patrols, and the wiring parties; that awful left where we joined up with —? You will understand how thrilling it was to walk about on that ground in broad daylight, smoking one’s pipe. Remember how our chaps used to risk their lives in the early daya for such silly souvenirs as nose-caps, and that kind of thing. “You could gather ’em by the cartload hereabouts, and Boche caps una burtons, and bits of uniform ana boots, and broken rifles and old tags of equipment, cartloads of it. • To other and on the maps, one place seems just like another, I suppose;, but to us —L a Boiselie and Oviliers—my hat! To walk about in those hells! Not one of those broken walls we knew so well (through our glasses) is standing now; and only a few jagged spikes where the trees were. I went along the ‘sunken road’ all the way to Cbntalmaison. Talk about sacred ground! When I think what that No Man’s Land was to us for nearly a year! “The new troops coming up now go barging across it in the most lighthearted way_ They know nothing about it. It means no more to them than the roads behind used to mean to us. Its’ all behind to them, and never was the front. But when I think how we watered every yard of it with blood and sweat —those devilish Narrows, you know. Children might play there now, if it didn’t look so much like the aftermath .of an earthquake. “But you know there's a kind of wrench about seeing the new chaps swagger over it so carelessly, and seeing it gradually merged into the behind-the-line country. I have a sort of feeling it ought to be marked off' a permanent memorial.”