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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 8 (November 1, 1938)

[section]

Mobile Light Railway “Somewhere in France,” Armistice Day, 1918.

Armistice day comes round again, reviving a host of memories of those hectic years 1914–1918. Where were you when the glad news flashed across the world on 11th November, 1918? Twenty years ago, along with a little band of “soldier-railwaymen” engaged on transport work near Lille, in Northern France, the writer celebrated the signing of the Armistice in a little wooden shack which did duty for a mess. A couple of yards from the mess door lay the light railway that snaked its way through the shell-torn poppy-fields lying between Merville and Lille, over which we had been busily engaged for weeks past rushing up men and supplies to keep pace with the enemy retreat. Recently revisiting the scene of his wartime exploits, your correspondent sought to trace the tracks of many of these light railways with which he was connected, between Arras and the Belgium frontier near Ypres. Actually, almost all these one-time vital strategic lines have disappeared. In one or two instances short stretches of British military light railway still serve the area to-day, but of our camps, traffic controls, and the like, scarcely a trace remains. We were privileged to serve on both standard-gauge and light railways in France and Belgium, with the Railway Troops of the Royal Engineers, and later on the Transportation Staff of the Rhine Army in Germany. Our outstanding memory, as Armistice Day comes round, will always be of the heroism and supreme devotion to duty of those gallant soldier-railwaymen who kept traffic moving under the most trying conditions over the flimsy lines immediately behind the fighting-front. Always cheerful, always anxious to put their last ounce of energy into whatever task they might be allotted, it was indeed a privilege to command a body of such men. In the “Railway Gazette” special War Transportation Issue, published nineteen years ago, we were enabled to put on record the fine work performed by light railways on the Western Front. To-day, we can but re-echo the closing words of that review: “Casualties were inevitable, but the memory of those very gallant railwaymen who paid the supreme sacrifice will ever be with us.”