THE TURNING POINT.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 52, 1 March 1916, Page 8

THE TURNING POINT.

POSITION IN THE WEST. THE DOMINANT ALLIES. (From H. S. GULLETT, Official Australian Correspondent at British Headquarters in France.) ''Munitions and munitions, and still more munitions/ declared . Sir John French last March; and" to-day the munitions are here. When the Allies stopped the German flood on this front more than a year ago, they achieved a miracle by opposing a thin line of men against an overwhelmingly greater number oi enemy troops supported by incalculably superior gun?. The German host had the advantage in every contrivance oi war, from the machinegun to heavy artillery. He iailed, but lor months afterwards his advantage in number of men and equipment was clear, and his offensive pronounced. We hung on" by matching men against machines. The agony of those first winter months can never be told. Our force was precariously weak, and without reserves, and the men waded knee and waist-deep in the frozen muck and water of the ditches, which were gracpd by the name of trenches. The shells travelled nearly all one way—from east to west. Our men prayed for quiet: every gun we fired brought an avenging avalanche" of shell irom the enemy. Our marvellous old regular army alternately cursed and jested, as it crowned its centuries of performance in the last days before it ■was to be swallowed up in tho new citizen armiop then massing in every part of the British Kmpire. THE POSITION REVERSED. To-day the position is reversed. The grim song of the shells is now from West to East. Behind our trenches the'guns boom ceaselessly, and the German reply is feeble. If the enemy fires a few rounds he.gets them back many times over. We are no longer fighting his machines with men, but meeting his machine with a superior machine. And what is more, the enemy knows and admits it. He is as civil and meek to-day a= he was truculent and aggressive a year ago. He practises every known deVice for easing off the intensity of the struggle; on every mile of the front he is plainly signalling for local peace. He Tarely takes the lead in gun-fire, and contrives by keeping quiet to quell our growing desire for battle. Similarly in the trenches, his men acting no dovtbt ■under the instruction of the highest command, seek tg maintain a live-and-let-live policy. They have ceased hanging out sign's 'about their "victories - ' in other fields, and they frequently put up men to sit on their parapets in the hope that out men, desiring a little respite, •will do likewise. But we are past the days of such things. The luckless German peacemaker no sooner takes his seat onthe parapet, than.he is shot by half a dozen eager British riflemen. The German game is too obvious. The enemy, hating us more each day as his armies inevitably approach the danger point of exhaustion, feigns amity, only because he knows that every minute's truce gives him time to engage' in -adventures in other fields, where he hopes that a happy chance might supply him •with new armies and the Allies with fresh embarrassments. PLEXTY OF nu>~?. An officer to-day pointed to a slight depression behind a little rid-re close to the firing-line. The area indicated perhaps 100 acres, and but for ». wrecked farmhouse seemed innocent of war. "In tsrat little hollow/ he said, "there aje 60 or 7" guns. Great, isn't it?' , liis eyes sparkled with satisfaction. Soon afterwaids Che enemy fired come 6hrapnel at a British working party who had exposed themselves. Immediately the Britiah suns were bellowing all axound ■us. The' Flanders fields of December are almost as barn, as our inland country in a season of drought, but we saw neither guns nor men. The concealment was perfect. Tiiere came no more German ehra-pnel. "That is the new order of thirgs," continued the officer. "Every time he opens his mouth ■offensively, we <b"itteT the face oil 'him." In the trenches spirits rise with the arrival of each new battery and ac machine-guns are carried to their positions. Not that the British soldier in the trenches ever appeared depressed. Experience here goes to establish that if you want to make a young Anglo-Saxon grow more and more cheerful, you must plunge him deeper and deeper into slime and danger. The more unspeaiable the trenched, ■the more frequent the laughter. Perhaps it is bluff, but if so it i? sustained t and convincing Huff, and its value is to be measured by the value of having the Channel ports in the hands of the Allies, ajid mot in the possession of the enemy. But the gaiety of the critical days "of last winter was the gaiety of recklessness and desperation. The confidence why:li mairks the demeanour of the men in the trenches to-day is soundly .based on reason. Defeat on thia front is now inconceivable. The anxious days have passed, and while victory may be etill some distance off, and along tithe road to be travelled casualties may be heavy, every man knows and feels that di-e l~io.~a~.uiut upon, the winning side. Signs' of the coming triumiph abound. Germany may win elsewhere; here he, •will .when the time comes be inexorably driven back. THE STATE OF THE TRENCHES. The single'disappointment about the front now is the state- of tlie trenches. You had hoped-that after a year's experience, and ."with the'wealth and resources of Britain and France to draw •upon, the trenches might have been made tolerably dry and warm. But long ■before you reach the front line you reafee how hopeless it is to expect to find anything but an irregular jumble of ditches with mucky, crumbling sides, and bottoms deep with slush. From Casses. the old French.town built oh a ■hill which rises abruptly to a heig"ht ol some hundreds, of feet out of the plain o: French Flanders, you look out over a dreary winter countryside of which quite one-third is flooded. The landscape appears to have 'been overrun by the ibackwash of some great sluggish river in a season of excessive rain. As you approach the lines the surrounding fields are squares of water set betwepn the leafless hedgerows; the bottomless mud on cither side of the narrow metal track is churned by countless wheel tracks. Every drain runs a banker. Guns sound close ahead; and you know the trenches are there, and as you think of thousands of men living underground in such conditior.6, the war becomes , more revolting than ever before. You muck up to the Sines expediting scenes of indescribable misery and Buffering. But you are agreeably surprised. The trenches are as they must t>e, broken unshapely successions of irregular drains. The men are animated, lengths of. ;wet mud. But even with

the heavy Tain falling, and t&e yellow flood about their feet, they are warm and dry. Most of them have waterproof coats and rubber waders reaching to the body. In every sodden dug-out bums a glowing brazier, and sleeping places are relatively dry. ' It is lunch time. Steaks are frying, and tinned vegetables ibroiling, and every man has hie share of hot refreshing tea. Guns, out guns, J sound briskly behind, and a procession ot shells go east and burst in the lines ot the enemy. Your feelings of horror vanish, and you rejoice in the dryness, warmth and the good food, of this sloshing, wading army. '"Keep 'em dry and feed s em well, and water is nothing," says an officer. "They aTe ac healthy as' North Sea fishermen. Give us enough waterproof coats, and long rubber boots, and the winter has no terror for us." It is the same at any part of the line. In November there was a little foot trouble, but now that the Tubber waders are becoming general, and the men are compelled to wear them, the health of the army is probably better than that of an equal number of men of the same age in, say, the United States. The trenches cannot be improved beyond, a certain point; all the forethought and all the pumps in the world would not keep clear of water thousands of miles , of ditches running through what is more or less a clay ibog. Two years ago ninety per cent of the men who are non-com-batants, if shown anything resembling these winter trenches, would have declared that if put into them they would be dead in three days. Some of the men you meet are now in their second winter, and on the average they are probably far healthier and substantially heavier than they were when leading a relatively soft civilian life and sleeping between sheets. The day has apparently gone by when weather can become a decisive factor in war. GUARDED OPTIMISM". One must be guarded when writing about the growing spirit of confidence which now distinguishes the Western armies of the Allies. Shells are not everything. It has been reported that the French fired off six million shells in three weeks during the great Champagne offensive and the result was the capture of some 30,000 German prisoners and a few square miles of territory. The German line was dented, but it was as a wall of lead might be dented with a heavy steel hammer. The gain was inappreciable, either in Champagne or in the British line at Loos. Nor is there sure and early victory in growing preponderance of men upon our t side. We shall probably wait a long time yet before we are able to smash through the enemy trenches over a wide front, and compel a general withdrawal or a decisive fight in the open. The power to break the front trench, and after that the supporting trenches, to the depth of a mile or two at any chosen part of the line, does not mean that the Germans arc in any immediate danger of being forced to return across the Rhine. Unfortunately, as the successful infantry rush, triumphantly from one shatterea enemy trench to another, fearlessly bombing and bayoneting as they go,, they also rush.beyond the shelter of their artillery, and there comes a stage when they are automatically arrested by batteries" and reserve machine-gun defences of the army. There must then be a halt, not only for lerv to come up, but a TaS'T'ongei halt , while the guns-find their new objective; and as the attacking infantry can only be pushed forward after trenches have been demolished and barbed wire cut away, the gun .practice must be extremely precise, and so the range-finding must necessarily be very slow. .The allied armies have learned these things at a terrible cost. They have learned that no cause, however just, no fighting spirit, however noble its stimulus and heroic- its application, can alone beat down the enemy machine. The defensive machine must be met with an offensive machine of enormously greater strength, and at best progress must be slow. But still the feeling along our front becomes more confident from day to day. Anu every soldier knows why. The German is failing on paper and in the field. On paper it can easily be shown that the enemy began with so many millions, that his casualties (reckoning with exactitude by the casualties of the Allies and his own official lists) have been so many, and his numbers to-day are so many. This kind of calculation might not seem satisfactory at a time when Germany i≤ embarking fresh enterprises in other fields. But fortunately it doc 3 not stand alone. Unhappily for the Germans the paper calculation is more than borne out by the daily evidence of the battle front.THE CAREFUL ENEMY. At the outset of the war, so extravagant with men and munitions, the German i≤ now extremely sparing of both. He is on this western front seeking no battle, great or small. Of course at times he has to bluff and counter, or he would soon be without the confidence of his army and the support of the German people. But all day now he tikes our shell fire, and makes little response. If we did not worry him, he would scarcely fire at all. There is now no such place ac "Xo Man's Land" between the trenches. What was "No Man's Lapd" for a year now belongs to us. The German rarely sets foot on it. We cross it and bomb him every night, and only rigid discipline keeps our bombing parties from being multiplied by ten. Kight.lv or wrongly, and all evidence is that it is rightly, our soldiers believe that they have got the "Bo3che." man for man and mile for mile, baidly beaten. ,£jo far we cannot go ttrrough him. We know ac will ashe that tjie'. advantage is with the defensive, and that each day the- defensive can be strengthened by further earthworks and an '.increase;in machine guns. : Moreover, we know that the enemy might at some time get a second wind by the surrender of some of the conquered country and the shortening of his line. But we know that as more and more of-our shells and ■bombs explode amongst him, his strictly limited man power i≤ reduced, while ours, despite our casualties, is daily increasing. The enemy holds altogether isome 1500 miles, of front, and as our "uns increase so do his casualties. r He sutlers losses,. counting killed .aid wounded and prisoners and sick, or at least 10 men per mile per day—that is, 15,000 casualties a day, or 105,000 a week. Give him all the best of the calculation, and say he loses a million in three months. Then as his aggressiveness diminishes, as it undoubtedly does on this Western front, our own casualtiee fall far below his, -while we can bear losses better than he. The feeling here is not one of excitement, tout one of quiet confidence that in the fulness of time, next year or the year after, the Germane will, despite their doubtful recruits in the Balkans and elsewhere, ibecome so thin on their line that we shall 'be able to break them. And once we burst through on a, front of some 15 to 20 miles, the decision will have been made and tie war practically Jinifihed, "' (