THE HARMLESS NECESSARY ENGLISH.

ONE of these days it will happen, we may quite confidently expect: the spirit of Gallic irony will poise a moment over the British Western Front and wing back to Paris gay with the dis- covery that there are English soldiers fighting there. I can imagine, though I dare not try to imitate, the impish wit with which the theme will be developed. Jean Pas de Nom will record how, on going to the battlefield to see the heroic deeds of the Australians, Canadians, Irish, Newfoundlanders, New Zealanders, Scottish, South Africans, and Welsh in the British Army, he encountered unexpectedly another tribe of fighters, the English, hitherto un- known and unrecorded. He will tell of their habits, customs, speech, and manner of fighting with the glee of a discoverer. Not more glad was Sir Joseph Banks finding a new world of botany opened to him on landing at Botany Bay.

It is not given to an English pen to venture on such irony. So I must be content in a duller way to state explicitly that there are English soldiers on the British front ; that indeed there are more English soldiers than all the rest combined (a quite natural fact, since the white population of England is greater than that of the other parte of the Empire) ; and try to give a reason why this fast has been so mush ignored in popular comments on the war. The reason lies in what may be called the philosophy of pub- licity. A great New York editor, seeking to explain to a "cub reporter " what is news, illustrated : "If this afternoon on Broad- way a dog bites a man, that is not news. But if a man bites adog. that is news." It is the unusual, the abnormal, that a newspaper must seek to record. It is not its business to write history, but to provide day by day some of the raw material of history. A news- paper that sought to give a considered and well-balanced record of a day's events would take a year in going to press, and would then be suitable for the library rather than the breakfast-table. Look backward at the campaign on the British front in Flanders and Artois in the light of newspaper conditions. At first very little publicity of any kind was allowed. We heard nothing at all of that modern Thermopylae when the First Five Divisions held the Alliedleft flank. (The First Five Divisions were made up of English soldiers in excess of the due racial proportions in the British Islands.) When the ban on news was a little less severe, contemporary English newspaper records gave the casual reader the idea that the British Army was almost wholly made up of Indian troops, or at least that the Indian troops were doing most of the work. The Indian troops were the unusual feature of the Army. They stood out from the mass. They had paragraph value. Their place was taken for a brief while by Territorial troops—the London Scottish in particular—for the same reason. Later the Canadians arrived at the front, and they had, as newcomers, as Colonial volunteers, the chief paragraph value for a time. When the Anzacs made their appear- ance first, they held the stage. Now at different times one group or another of the great Imperial Army oomes into the field of the snap-shot camera with which the journalist records the events of the day. But the mass of the Army, which is English, rarely gets special attention, because it is the mass, and as the mass its "news function" is to provide the background for some group or other. Yet in every great battle the English troops, naturally, have been the most numerous, have done their full share of the work in hand, and have not been backward in gallant emulation among their Imperial brothers to do deeds of shining courage. When a con- sidered history of the war comes to be written this fact will be plain. But it is not, and never will be, made plain in current popular accounts.

And the High Command, for other reasons than those governing newspaper conditions, often has to assist in buttressing an incorrect and disproportionate view of the English work at the front. If in a despatch special mention is made of the gallantry of Canadian or Australian troops in some action, nothing in the way of information is given to the enemy. But special mention of " English " troops would be so yarn, as to be almost useless ; the mention needs to be of Keats, of Worcestershires, or Londoners. or Yorkshires ; and that might communicate to the enemy really valuable information as to the disposition of our troops, and so is not always possible. A great amount of the Staff work at the front is devoted to

identifying the enemy's divisions in different sections of the line, watching out for the appearance of newdivisione, for thesplitting up

of veteran unite to stiffen weaker units, and soon. This work is easy to us, for we are constantly taking prisoners. It is harder for the Germans, because they rarely get prisoners from us now. We have

to be on guard against giving the enemy foots which might prove

the keys to the solution of puzzles that are worrying him. A current incident to illustrate the value of identification is the largo

reward which we know the Germans to have offered to their regi-

ments in the line for the rapture of the first American prisoner. It is not that the Hun intends to scalp that American prisoner and burn him at the stake (for the Hun is probably short of fuel), but that he is worrying thus early as to the direction from which the new attack is likely to oome. When he can certainly identify an American division at any point of the line, he will be in a better

position to draw conclusions. Similarly, though not quite of the same importance, knowledge that a certain English regiment was in a certain place on a certain day would be valuable to the enemy.

So the conspiracy of circumstances makes it necessary that the harmless necessary English should be ignored to a greet degree in the current accounts of the war. I do not think that the English soldier " grouses " on the subject. Indeed, I am sure he does not feel hurt, for he makes it a subject of "chipping," and with him chipping is always a sign of good humour and complacency. He does not " chip " when he is sore about a thing, and he only " chips " with, and at, those people who are his friends.

Thus the closest of friends are the gunners and the infantry, and between gunner and infantryman " chipping " is constant. Infantry develops the theme that the gunner is a selfish hound who stays far back in the rear because he would be frightened to death if he saw a Hun. Artillery retorts that he can't see why they keep the infantry mud-crunchers in the field at all, beoause the gunners do all the real fighting. That is "chipping." If it is done artistic- ally, it will amuse a shed full of men just as the " back-chat " of nigger minstrel comedians does. It is proof, as I have said, of the most thorough good understanding between the "chippers." It shows (in the instance quoted) that they know that the Artillery provides the very best kind of preparatory school for teaching the Hun manners, and that the Infantry provides the finishing school.

Now on this point of the share of the work at the front, when an English division is neighbour to a Colonial division and the men become really good friends (not until then) there will be great "chipping." I overheard once, in Munster Alley on the Somme. some Australians and some Yorkshire " Tykes " explaining very humorously to one another how entirely unnecessary the other fellow was in the campaign. The Australians professed to think that the British really ought to go home and let people who knew how to deal with Fritz run the show; and the "Tykes " professed to believe that the Australians were cannibals, and if they were not watched well would cat the Germans and come back and poison the whole Army with contagion And they were the best of friends (they were practising communism in " fags "), for it is only among good friends that this chipping is allowed.

No, the English soldier is not sore about his lack of paragraph value. Probably the local paper of his town keeps an eye on his battalion, and occasionally lets his fellow " towneys " know that the Blankshires or the Nutlands are doing their bit : and he is con- tent with that. But the outside observer, the neutral in our midst, is apt to be awkwardly, perhaps dangerously, m isled. So, as a matter of patriotism, if not of news, the British Press should occasionally go out of its way to record the existence at the front of the English. There is really a rich mine of paragraphs in the English " Tommy." He is so quaint as well as sturdy as a fighter ; not gay, not reckless, but good-humoured, killing only as a matter of sheer necessity, and being killed with a stoic indifference : a " sticker " of the first quality, but always airing some silly little grouse ; holding a trench like a hero and grumbling about the breakfast bacon like a querulous old Pacificist. Aninoident sticks in my mind of the charge that took Martinpuich. As we strolled up through a very poor specimen of Hun barrage—" strolled " is the accurate word—a " Tommy " dropped into a shell-hole and took cover for a moment there. His sergeant called out : "Here, Hawkins [that is not the right name], what are yer hanging back for " Hawkins got up and resumed the stroll. " Who's a-hanging back ? " he said. " Can't a man have a half-mo' to light his blinking fag ? Who's a millionaire and got all the crimson matches that a man can't get down to light a fag." During the morning Hawkins did very well and his name was sent forward for a mention. But he was still grousing, hours. after, about the unreasonableness of the sergeant, who had not recog- nized that he would not go down a shell-hole except " to light a

Lig." And the stubborn trench-holding way in which " Tommy "

sticks to his cliche'e, his little jokes 1 Shells are always " iron rations" to him because he doesn't like the iron ration (the bag of biscuits, beef, sugar, tea, and meat extract which is the emer- gency ration) ; neither eating it, which he must do sometimes ; nor carrying it about, which he must do always ; nor explaining why he has lost it, which ho has to do often. After Loos be wrote home joyfully about "giving Fritz his iron rations." Every Somme artillery preparation the same phrase cropped up constantly in his letters, and I wager that after the Menin Road battle a full fifty per cent. of the letters from the field recorded that " Fritz was given his iron rations and did not like them."

Perhaps without great sacrifice of the interesting for the sake of the true, the newspapers might give an occasional day, or week, to " featuring " the English soldier, his good-humoured, irresistible stubbornness in attack or defence, his admirable patience under real afflictions, and his quaint impatience under trifles. And why not open up now the records of those wonderful first months when English regiments did what seemed to be impossible ? When the war has been won and the accounts are made up, it will be found most certainly that the English, man for man, have done at least their full share of all the hard fighting. Meanwhile they are getting

less than justice in contemporary records. PEASE Fox.