RUSSIAN ARMY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 November 1941, Page 6

RUSSIAN ARMY

VASTLY BETTER EQUIPPED THAN IN LAST WAR.

AND WITH FINER NATIONAL SPIRIT.

The Russian Army is incomparably better equipped than in the last war, and the magnificent resistance, sometimes even without cartridges, which I witnessed then prepared me well enough to expect the tough and effective stand of today, of which Germans eye-witnesses at the front give such impressive accounts, says Sir Bernard Pares, the well-known authority on Russia, writing in the “Contemporary Review.” The Russian was always master of the German, as man to man --Napoleon himself has recorded this —and as in the last war he wins all bayonet encounters. The Red Army is no longer defending estates of squires or the profits of capitalists, but the national possessions of the whole community. The pitiful educational gap between officers and men has now been closed, and “every soldier carries in his knapsack the baton of a marshal.” Country and people play their part around the fighting forces as they did with Napoleon —only with far more organisation and efficiency, in which the broadcast now plays a conspicuous part—and the enemy’s path is laid waste around him. In the rear, the magnificent spirit of 181.2 is far more articulate today, and the tremendous drive of Stalin’s five-year plans of production has prepared the conditions in which today workers of all sorts are themselves doubling their own output. Already the nationalising process of the war is felt in army, people and Government. Stalin’s rule had already given it a long preface. I believe that, as the war goes on, it will give ever greater reality to the cause of democracy and liberation for which both Government and people are already fighting.