TROMMELFEUER.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 244, 12 October 1916, Page 7

TROMMELFEUER.

THE BATTLE OF TO _ AY.

(Copyright res—red by the Crown.) |

ITS FIRST AND LAST WEAPON.

(From Captain C. E. W. BEAN, Official Press Representative with the AJ.F.) BRITISH HEADQUARTERS, France. August 21. The Germans call it Trommelfeuer— drum-fire. I do not know any better description for the distant sound of it. We hear it every day from some quarter of this wide battlefield. You will be sitting at your tea, the normal spasmodic banging of your own guns sounding in the nearer positions five, ten, perhaps fifteen times in the minute. Suddenly, from over the distant hills to left or right there breaks out the roll of a great kettle-drum, ever so far 'away. Someone is playing the tattoo softly and very quickly. If it is nearer, and especially if it is a German, it sounds as if he played it on an iron ship's tank instead. That is trommelfeuer —what we call intense bombardment. When it is very rapid, like the swift roll of a kettledrum, you take it that it must be the French 75_ down South preparing the way for a French assault. But it is often our own guns after all. I doubt if there are many who can really distinguish between the distant sound of them. Long afterwards, perhaps in the grey of the next morning, you may see outside of some dugouts, guarded by half, a dozen Australians with fixed bayonets, a group of dejected men in grey. They are the men who have been through the trommelfleur. OVERTAKING THE GERMANS. Strong men arrive from that experience shaking like leaves in tbe wind. I have seen one of our youngsters—a boy who had fought a great fight all through the dark hours and who had refused to come back when he was first ordered to —I have seen him unable to keep still for an instant after the strain, and yet ready to fight on till he dropped; physically almost a wreck, but with his wits as sharp and his spirits as keen as a steel chisel. I have seen others -who after doing glorious work through thirty or forty honrs of unimaginable strain, buried and buried and buried again and still working like tigers, have broken down and collapsed, unable to stand or to walk, unable to move an arm except limply as. if it were string, ready to weep like little children. It is the method which the German invented for his. own use. For a year and a-half he had had the monopoly of it —our men had to liang on as best they could under the knowledge that the enemy had more gun 3 and more shells than we, and bigger shells at that. But at last the weapon seems to have been turned against him. No doubt his armaments and munitions are growing fast, but ours have for the moment overtaken them. And hell though it is for both sides—something which no soldiers in the world's history ever yet bad to endure —it is better for ns at present than for the Germans. T have heard men coming out of the thick of it say, "Well, T'm glad I'm not a German." WHAT IT MEANS. Now here _ what it means. There is no good _ohe By "describing the particular horrors of wa_-God knows those who see them want to forget them as soon as they can—but it is just as well to know what the work in the munitions factories mean to our friends, your sons and fathers and brothers at the front. The normal shelling of the afternoon— a scattered bombardment all over the landscape, which only brings perhaps half a dozen shells to your immediate neighbourhood once in every ten **n*nutes—has noticeably quickened. The German is obviously turning oh more batteries. The light field-guns' shrapnel is fairly scattered, as before. But nve-point-ninc howitzers are being added to it. Except for his small field guns the German makes little use of guns. His work is almost entirely done with how-, itzcrs. He possesses big howitzers— | eight-inch and larger—as we do. But, the backbone of his artillery is the five-point-nine howitzer, and the four-point-two Tbe shells from both these guns arc beginning to fall more thickly. Huge black clouds shoot into the air from various parts of the foreground, and slowly drift away across the hilltop Suddenly there is a" descending shriek drawn out for a second or more, coming terrifyingly near, a crash far louder than thunder, a colossal thump to the earth which seems to move the whole world about an inch from its base; a scatter of flying wood splinter, whirr of fragments, scatter of falling earth. Before it is half finished, another exactly similar shriek is coming through it. Another crash—apparently right on the crown of your head, as if the roof beams of tbe sky had broken in. You can just hear through the crash the shriek of a third and fourth shell as tbey come tearing down the vault of heaven—crash, crash! Clouds of dust are floating over you. A swifter shriek, and something breaks like a glass bottle in front of the parapet, sending its fragments slithering low overhead. It burst like a rainstorm, sheet upon sheet, smash, smash, smash, with one or two more of the heavier shells punctuating the shower of light ones. The lighter shell is shrapnel from field guns, sent, I daresay, to keep you ■in the trench while the heavier shells pound you there. A couple of salvoes from each, perhaps twenty or thirty shells in the minute, and the shrieks ceame. The dust drifts down . the hill. The sky clears. The sun looks in. Five minutes later down comes exactly such another shower. That is the beginning. As the even big wears on the salvoes become more frequent. All through the night they go on. The next morning the intervals are becoming even less. Occasionally the: hurricane reaches such an intensity that there seems no interval at all. There is; an easing in the afternoon, which may indicate that the worst is over or merely that the guns - are being cleaned or the gunners having their-tea. Towards dusk it swells in a wave, heavier• than any that baa yet come. All —trough th-3 second night the -inferno lasts. In the grey dawn of the 6econd day "it increases' in a manner almost unbelievable—the duet of — covers everything; it is quite impossible to see. The- earth shakes and quivers with the pounding. It is just then that the lighter guns j(*n in. -wit— tbe roll aa of a kettled_m --Tronnnelfener. The enemy"- throwing _„ infantry, and his shrapnel is showering on to our Ones in order to keep the heade of our men down to the last moment. Suddenly the whole, noise cesses. The- enemy casting hia shrapnel -and'lrig"s__l f_rt_Br*■*_*. roe, _____ -are- -Jab -meat *_**_. -in g___ tt s-*i*&»»_to-- l _-*hrrtV3*_--do-the enemy* even deliver- . that __ac_ .<_-_ot. Our'_—■_tnj l "tgnstotha h_—l of it before _-_n_*e_iNo __n!a —and. A few figures on "—ie eky__v_*opping from crater to crater, amticate-what isr

I left of it. As soon as- they find rifle fire j and.machine guns on them—he remnant give it _p «c hopeless. And what pf tbe men who have been out there under that hurricane night and day until ite duration almost passed nremoiy? Amidst sights aad. sounds indescribable, desperately tried. I was out there once after such a-time as that. There they were—Sydney "boys, country fellows from New South <Walee. our old friends, just as we-, knew them, tired to death as after a long fight with a bush fire, or heavy vnork in drought time—but just doing their ordinary Australian work in their ordinary Australian way. And that is .all they bad -been doing. But what are we going to do for them? The mere noise is enough to break any man's nerves- Every one of those shrieking shells which fell night and day may mean any man's instant death. As he hears each, shell, crossing be knows it He saw the sights around him. He was buried by earth and dug out by his mates, and he dug them out in turn. What can we do for him 2 I know only one thing. It is the only-alle-viation that science knows of. We can force' some mitigation of %11 this by one: means and one alone —if we can give the German- worse. The one anxiety in the mind of the soldier is—have we-got the guns and the shells—can we keep ahead of them with gons and our ammunition? That means everything. These men hare the nerve to gr> through these infernos provided their -friends ati home do not desert them. If the muni-j tion worker conld see what I have seen*! he would toil as though he were racing I against time to save the lives of. men. i