Modesty about achievements
WHILE we take pride, a legitimate pride, in the achievements of our own troops from New Zealand in the war, now happily drawing to a favourable termination, and while no praise is more grateful to us than praise of them, it seems to us to be highly undesirable to claim for them any greater recognition than is their due and to institute invidious comparisons between them and the troops from other parts of the Empire. It is in distinctly bad taste for any country to boast that the men it has contributed to a great army are superior to those
supplied by any other country for the execution of the common enterprise upon which the Empire and its Allies have been engaged during the war. For this reason we are inclined to deprecate the flattering reverence by an unknown general to New Zealand troops, as contained in a cable message which we published last week, just as we think it was unfortunate and regrettable that Mr Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia, should recently have claimed that it was through the ‘‘great valour and unquenchable spirit of the dominion troops’’ that the thrust by the Germans on the Amiens front was broken at the time of the great enemy offensive some months ago. Probably the truth is that the troops from the various parts of the Empire possess distinctive qualities, peculiar to themselves, all of them valuable, which have contributed to the success that has, we now clearly and gratefully see, crowned the efforts of the British army as a whole in combination with
the gallant armies associated with it. Another form of mischievous misstatement, to which some people in the dominions have, we fear, given a certain amount of credence has attributed to the Higher Command in the British army a tendency to make excessive demands on the services of the overseas troops. The Germans themselves have alleged that the divisions from the dominions have been more largely exposed to the shock of battle than the British divisions have been. They have had their own reasons for seeking to create an impression that the British troops have been spared to a greater extent than the troops from overseas. The fact that the Germans have alleged this should in itself have been sufficient to create a suspicion of the untrustworthiness of the assertion.