CAMP AMONG TREES

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21194, 17 August 1940, Page 20 (Supplement)

CAMP AMONG TREES

NEW ZEALAND SOLDIERS SURROUNDINGS IN ENGLAND (From the Official War Correspondent attached to the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force). Never has the countryside of England looked more pleasing than now; and never has Great Britain been in greater need of her sons’ help. “We are glad to be here. We would rather be here than anywhere else in the world,” was the comment of one of our officers. Subject to the 'qualification that they will be even more glad to be home when this is all over, that goes for the men too. They are rapidly shaking down in surroundings much more resembling those of a holiday motor camp in New Zealand than the accepted idea of an English military camp. Tents are pitched with an eye for safety from the air; here and there among the trees. When there is a row of them it is because a row of trees offers protection. There is no such thing as a canvas town laid out in neat little rectangles. Those of the bell tents which have not been camouflaged are brown like the pine needles or the shallow-rooted grass on the sandy soil. Those that are camouflaged melt into their arboreal background, so realistically sometimes as not to be recognisable at a casual glance from a couple of hundred yards. Headquarters Group Men are quartered eight to a tent, the tents being fitted with wooden floors; and the unconventional surroundings offer more than the usual military opportunities for improvising home comforts. Except for the guy ropes of a neighbour’s tent, and his canvas bucket in the foreground, the view through my tent flap-as I write is all trees and fern! pines mostly (although they are out of their latitude at this end of the island) with beeches on the fringe. Two axes are at work; behind them two handy New Zealanders fashioning bush furniture and other interior fitments for their tents. Down a fern-crowned bank, beyond the cookhouses, is a field ringed with deciduous. trees; then across a lane another, and, beyond again, a second such treed ridge as this is. To one side, on another rise and set in a glory of trees, massive, hoary, spreading trees laden with foliage and spilling shade far across close-crop-ped lawns, is Headquarters, once a stately private home. There Brigadier Miles and his staff work. This is the largest of the New Zealand camp groups. It accommodates the entire sth Infantry Brigade as well as the divisional details attached to the second, echelon.

Six miles away are the Maoris, and beside them the Medical Corps and the Dental Corps. Other separate camps have been pitched for our artillery, A.S.C., Engineers and Railwaymen and Foresters. This stringing out of units will make administration more difficult —visiting all the camps involves a journey of between 40 and 50 miles —but may assist specialised training. The three infantry battalions are together for the first time, and brigade manoeuvres will begin shortly. For the rest, it has to be remembered that England is neither as safe nor as empty as Egypt. There are hundreds of thousands of other troops in this area, and in their own interest it is desirable that they should be as well distributed as military necessities will permit. Gas masks and steel helmets have been issued, and slit trenches are being dug adjacent to tents, to serve as refuges should raiders come over. These give protection against the lateral movement of a bursting shell, but not against direct hits or gas. They are plain trenches, usually in the form of an 1. about two feet wide and five or six feet deep, in which men may crouch and be safe from any missile which does not come more or less straight down upon them. Prior to the establishment of the first New Zealand General Hospital, the special medical camp placed near that of the Maori Battalion consisted in the main of its officers and men. The 32 New Zealand nurses who came with us to staff that hospital were quartered in private billets nearby. On the voyage they took turns of hospital duty, and at a port en route a group of eight was transferred from a New Zealand to an Australian transport to assist in handling an outbreak of measles. They remained with the Australians until we reached our port of destination.