CARELESS BRAVERY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XL, Issue 12538, 8 May 1915, Page 3 (Supplement)

CARELESS BRAVERY.

Well, I drank my week's leave to the dregs, and returned" with the feeling thai I had rially done my bit—a fueling 1 wish I could have come home with (writes a British officer). My stay brought horns to me a main charact.--vi.3tie of the Englishmen. I remember reading in the memoirs ci" a young A.D.C. to the Disk* of Wellington a passage in which lie related that as he grew bored with the monoiany of incessant fighting at Waterloo he lei t the battle for a :->hort holiday. 1 always thought that the statement was meant 'rather to amuse than to convey the truth.

But now that 1 have seen Englishmen playing football in a field where o. battery was in action, have watched them chase a hare into the firing line a few hours after they had been relieved from the trenclus and have actually croised the seas_ at the Government's expense for a week's hobday whilst the greatest war m history is in progress, I have no right to be amazed or amused at anything.

Here we are fighting out the struggle of our existence, and every week wo allow hundreds of men performing vital duties to go heme for a holiday. They are in the trenches one night and home the next morning. They are sleeping at the Berkeley one night and in a dug-out the next. You would "think that this rapid change of surroundings would lead to some excitement, would cause some feeling, such as joy at seeing parents or wives for the first time since the outbreak of war, to get the upper hand even of the passive Englishmen? But from the time we got into the special train at to the time wo shook the hands of these who met us

at Victoria, only one man Jet himself go so far as to whistle. There was more excitement as we came back-in the boat. Everyone was looking out for submarines, and, I am sure, experienced disappointment when we arrived at Boulogne and realised that we had not been torpedoed. And yet it would be incorrect to say that the Englishman does not realise the'propricty or the seriousness of things. He would" leave a ship in a storm to have a swim, but you cannot imagine him leaving a game of football to have a talk with a friend. He has throughout this war regarded the most terrible devices of the enemy with amusement or careless interest, and when watching it that he is renllv enthusiastic, and he will say things about (he referee which lie never felt-'aliout the mo---! ki'ltured German. About his great woik evitabK With these qualify we e.iiirot help winning one battle, and. tin! will it is only his game of football behind the trenches that really matters; it .is onlv he ccoes so carelessly that whrn you lookhack v\)c>x\ his achievements they seem inhave to be the last.