WESTERN THEATRE: Solidarity

Great Britain last week made two more demonstrations of Empire solidarity against Hitlerism. The first troops from India arrived in a British-held sector of the French front: an all-Moslem contingent of about 200 with their own cooks, water carriers, religious teachers, food—rice, turmeric, ginger, ghi (clarified butter). British supply officers set out to buy livestock, chiefly goats, for the Moslems to slaughter in their own pure way.

In England last week arrived the first Australian contingent, a full squadron of trained airmen—pilots, gunners, observers, mechanics. They marched ashore singing The Beer-Barrel Polka. Their commander is as handsome a fighting man as the stenographers in London’s Australia House have ever seen: Wing Commander Leon Vincent Lachal, nicknamed “Stumpy” though he is tall, blue-eyed, with wavy blond hair. (A number of Australians already flying with the R. A. F. may be transferred to “Stumpy” Lachal’s command.)

The Nazi radio scoffed: “The first Indian troops have arrived in France. This recalls to us the Indian troops used in the World War. The English then mobilized 650,000 Indians, 300,000 of which were sent to France. The rest had to stay in India for police patrolling. The Indians had great losses in France as they were not at all used to the winter climate and because they were sent into the front lines. Nearly 50% of them were annihilated. This was in accordance with the British proverb, ‘Empire troops into the front lines, we will stay behind.’ ”

Hailing the Australians, the London Times said: “This underlines like nothing else the warning to Germany by Mr. Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, that the family of peoples united in the British Empire are one and that winning the war is as important to one member of the family as it is to the other. To those Germans who have not yet been completely hypnotized by Dr. Goebbels this must come like the handwriting on the wall. Germany went into this war under two false assumptions: 1) that the western democracies are too decadent and spiritless to defend themselves no matter what humiliations and demands will be put to them; and 2) that the British Empire is already in a greatly advanced stage of disintegration and ready to fall apart with the first real demand made upon its unity.”

Stories of unsolidarity among Allied troops inevitably trickled into Paris at the heels of men home on this war’s first furlough. Metropolitan troops from Tunis were said to have been in a state of near mutiny ever since their arrival in France, heaving bread and canned corned beef at their officers, obliging the French to keep them surrounded by a constant guard. The 31st French infantry, after marching 120 kilometres (72 mi.) in three days, refused to march the fourth day, threw their arms into ditches, sat down in the road. They were not punished.

Between the French and British Air Forces there was jealousy because of inequality in pay. French planes are flown largely by noncoms at 600 francs per month, while R. A. F., still essentially an officers’ show, pays its pilots 6,000 francs. The French sergeant-pilots sleep on straw in barns; the British officer-pilots get beds. While the French are required to sit alert under their planes’ wing in their hangars through even the worst weather, on bad flying days the Britons play bridge in their bars.

To promote solidarity on his side, Adolf Hitler spent Christmas with his troops at the front near Saarbrücken, making a point of stepping upon a bit of soil formerly French in the Spicheren Heights salient. A degree of German unsolidarity was exposed last week when 600 German volunteers, mostly Aryan refugees from Hitler’s own Bavaria, sailed from Marseille to join the Foreign Legion at Sidi-Bel-Abbès. One of them, a university youth, exhibited a who-is-it riddle from a covert German student publication: “He wears a French mustache, combs his hair American style, salutes Roman, has a Czech accent, was born in Austria, carries out the Russian plan, is a foreigner and out-Germans the worst Germans for jingoism.”