THE LABOR BATTALION.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 April 1918, Page 2

THE LABOR BATTALION.

A UALLAI-I.T.LOT, Tlie Labor Corps behind the battle lines in France receives little in the way ol advertisement as a rule, but it had ail opportunity of distingnishin" itself m actual fighting during "the re" treat to Albert, and the correspondents suggest that the men fought as well with the bayonet as they toil .with pick and shovel, A brilliant little article which the War Office .circulated some tune afro tells, the story of this corps. It consists for the most part tof.'rejects men who volunteered for military ser-' vice and failed for one reasdn or another 1.0 pass the medical tests- Thev might have gone back to civil life! earning unprecedented wages, but thfcy seized the opportunity of da.mg worf[ of military value, joined tho . laboi" Battalions and were sent to France to foflbw in the wake of the fighting men.. 'Thev are the "men who tidy up." "Close behind the infantry, they bring pr;der into torn desolation," says the writer, "They it is who tidy up behind the men whose business is destruction, straightening things out bo that the destroyers may be fed They clear away the torn wire, tear down barricades, 'bury dead, build camps for their comrades. Forever they ? rt L| W x U, ', kl " S ~ Wor, V" g on t!le g rc 'ates't battlefield the world has ever seen. They are not Urst-line troops, but there is nothing •second-rate about their labors They are a part of our great armies as much as the stock is part of the rifle. I heir work is of import equal to the work of those who climb over the parapet and charge with bayonet and bomb. Without theiu the first line could not carry on."

1 lie . war had been in. progress two years before the labor,behind, tho lines was organised at ail, comprehensively T]iere had been labor battalions, at work earlier, it is true, but the vast machinery of war was then only in the process ol' being assembled, so far as the British were concerned. There had been need of labor, chiefly unskilled, and the War | Office had called for volunteers, and had accepted those men who were not (it for , military service, Abut who could still march three or .four miles to work, do a hard day's labor and march three or four miles back to their huts or encampmenU That, indeed, was the only test applied. A short-sighted man might ■still wield pick and shovel,though he could not be utilised in the firing line. Hen slightly deaf, men with legs that would not stand constant inarching, men with minor organic defects were available for the labor battalions, and the new service grew rapidly as did the array itself. There are thousands of imported workers in France, laboring under British and French supervision, but the hardest of the tasks fall to the British and French labor battalions. The chief of the British corps is a distinguished soldier who had held high commands xNaturally the problem of finding officers lor the battalions was a difficult one in the earlier stages,, but it was solved bv the promotion of men accustomed to handling labor in the mass and l>y employing military officers who, after rccovcry from wounds, were unfit for service with the army, but were anxious to m' working.

Our first Colonel," says the writer already quoted, "was a man of aristocratic family wealthy and gently bred, a man ill touch with the most influential circles in our land and he was succeeded in his command by an officer who started life as a man-servant The adjutant is an em gineer, a specialist in dock caissons. The captain commanding No. 1 Company was at Eton and later in the Rifle Brigadeone of our finest corps d'elite—and later still was called to the bar and practised as a barrister in Hong Kong. His youn<* lieutenant,' still slightly lame from a wound received at Loos last year, was a bank clerk before the war. No. 2 Company's commander is a working glasspamter; his lieutenant, a well-known big-game shot who has, travelled the wide world over in search of sport from Tibet to Lake _ Bangweolo and the Northern Eotjkies, is a wealthy landowner and an amateur of mediaeval armor and enamels. No. :i Company obeys a novelist whose lieutenant was a. builder's foreman, and the captain of No. 4, who began life as a ploughboy, has for his lieutenant a builder from the village of Petworth. in Sussex this same builder having distinguished himself in the hell of Trones Wood by sending back half-hourly reports in.a fair round hand throughout a day and night of deaths and horrors keeping carbon copies of each report as coolly as though he were tallying loads bricks from out his builder's yard. At the orders and under the directions of such officers and sergeants work a like mixed medley of lame and "revheaded men. Always close behind the fighting infantry, they clear the roads tor the guns. Shell craters are filled with all the horrid debris of the battlefield; trenches bridged with trunks of' fallen trees; wrecked house-walls &hoveiled swiftly aside; standing pools drained; new emplacements dug, that the heavy tractors, with the heavy guns behind them, may have clear passaao and some shelter at their journey's end. The men work furiously, needing no driving from officer or sergeant, for no man lingers a fc hj s task under shell fire. By Ihe time the guns are in emplacements am! roaring at their deadly work it is time to level the torn lands' before the advancing railhead As the rail comes winding its way alomr. the Labor men become its servants. They go before it to dig cuttings, to raise'embankments, to fell limber for the cross-ties, to fill in the eternal maze of trenches' which so long has scarred and defaced what once was a fruitful and a pleasant land. 1 hey it is who unload the fiat freight cars of ballast and stamp it down between the rails, who unload stone and tools for their brethren busy on repairing roads, now wearing visibly beneath the ever-increasing traffic. And more than once, when tired divisions have com! marching down from duty in the trenches, some lad, trudging in the ranks, rifle on shoulder, has seen a figure lie knows working by the roadside. And at his gay shouted greeting a father has looked up from his unaccustomed toil ana learnt, his son still lives."