RUSSIAN VALOUR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 November 1941, Page 6

RUSSIAN VALOUR

DEFENCE OF ROLLING PLAINS.

“Most of Russia is still flat, rolling plain. It’s the kind of country that German tank commanders have dreamed about for years, and unless the Russian Army had had its tanks and guns in great numbers the German dream would have been fulfilled, the Germans would have been in Moscow, by now,” said Mr I. Macdonald in a recent address. “Russian tanks and Russian bravery have barred the way, for the Russians are a brave people. That great plain of Russia produces its own type of people, its own cast of mind. When you are in the plain, living there, you see nothing all around you but the rolling waves of wheat and rye; and the few villages which you see afar off look like the forgotten hulks of ships in the middle of a sea. There’s a baking heat in summer, and in winter there’s a kind of slumbering deadness under the great blankets of snow. You have to'' be strong to live there at all. And when you live there you develop a feeling for the mysterious greatness of Russia, and a sense of the littleness of human life; and it’s in that spirit that the Russians fight. Napoleon saw it with amazement: ‘These Russians,’ he said, ‘stand and fight and, if need be, let themselves be killed like automata.’ Hindenburg and Ludendorff said the same thing in the last war. The Germans say it now. Of course, they try to say that the bravery is due to propaganda, but they begin to realise that it’s Russia, the toughness that is bred from a tough life.”