Winkles on Pins

Upon the British sector of the Western Front in France last week arrived Sir Philip Gibbs, K. B. E., a lifelong literary practitioner whose dispatches from the Allied fronts of 1914-18 constitute one of the classic chronicles of World War I. At 62, Sir Philip felt "like Rip Van Winkle coming back to the scenes of his youth," which hadn't changed much. "Has it been seven days' leave or 21 years?" he asked himself. "It is the same old scene, exactly as it has lived in my memory as a kind of dream."

He went for a ride in a tank across terrain which he quickly recognized. "In this very field once lay the dead bodies of German soldiers. A short distance away was a small hill where one morning I had seen a cavalry charge in a snowstorm. Now it was occupied by some of our mechanized troops who had never heard of that fight and stared at me when I told them about it as though incredulous."

"Like ghosts remembering ghosts," he and an oldtime officer talked. The officer said: "Do you know, I can hardly bring myself to believe that it may happen all over again. Yesterday I went to one of our war cemeteries, and when I stood there I felt a kind of rage and a kind of anguish. The damned folly of life has caught us again and the sons of those who died are going to be the victims of another evil spell. Can it be possible or isn't it just a nightmare from which we shall all wake up?"

Sir Philip looked closely at the new young B. E. F., decided they are less tough, probably better educated, more intelligent than B. E. F. 1914. "Their faces are not so square but more finely cut like town-bred men. They speak the King's English without the old country dialects of the boys who came from fields and farms in 1914. But I think they have the same stuff in them, and they belong to a mechanized age and a mechanized Army.

". . . One of them assured me several times that, as a tank officer, he was the winkle on the pin if war should ever begin in earnest. ... He enjoyed his dark saying as a priceless joke. . . .

"This Army of ours . . . still has the amateur spirit, which is deep in our character as a nation, or perhaps is a pose belonging to a tradition that we are loath to abandon. I cannot imagine the German Army behaving in the same informal, humorous way. . . ."

Two factors make today's B. E. F. even more informal than the one Sir Philip knew before. Though the caste system still remains between officers & men, it has been broken down somewhat by: 1) removing the ban on officers' hobnobbing with enlisted men off duty; 2) ruling that officers may be chosen from the ranks.

> Britain's first soldier dead in action in France was reported: William Roper, 28, of Dewsbury, Yorkshire, killed on volunteer guard duty.

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