BIG GUNS AT YPRES.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 11, 12 January 1918, Page 5

BIG GUNS AT YPRES.

CLOCK-LIKE REGULARITY. ANZACS GO THROUGH BARRAGE. (From Mr. C. E. W. Bean, Official Press Representative with the Australian Imperial Force—Copyright by Crown.) BRITISH HEADQUARTERS. France. "Clockwork," said the aßttery Major, as he looked around. The end of the first exhausting task of the field guns had come. It was the moment to limber up and dash to a forward position behind the infantry. The last round was fired. The whistle went. And there, waiting quietly under the remains of a certain battered hedge, were the teams arrived a few moments before from their lines far in the rear, where day after day they had waited for this instant. Ten minutes later the batteries were all drawn up waiting the word. The same battery major vvas standing With the commander of >he historic brigade. "We are waiting for your guns now, Colonel," he said. "I hope my fellows will be up to time," muttered the colonel, looking at his watch. The major looked up. "Here they come," he said. Over the brow of the hill were coming the horses of the leading team. They filed past the waiting batteries of the other brigade—never did batteries look better than these Australian units in the thick of this latest great battle of Flanders. The waiting batteries fell into line behind them, and the column wound its way over the misty low lands towards positions where for nearly three long years the green flats had been gradually torn into crater fields, and where through all that time until this morning no man nor body of men dared to move openly. FIRST HINT OF TROUBLE. Far ahead, over the last rise on the route, where the battery commanders were out on the scattered country selecting the exact positions where each battery as it arrived should go there was some hint that matters would not always proceed so smoothly. The country was full of movement. Infantry columns advancing; lines of men moving up the further ridge; tanks crawling forward on their bellies in the mud; parties of German prisoners coming back. Occasionally streams of machine gun ,bullet 6 whistled past. One party of infantrymen appeared to take cover from them behind shell craters. In passing those men the reconnoitring artillery officers found that they were not sheltering. Evidently there were German machine guns 6till unsuppressed somewhere in the landscape, which were turning from one group of men to another. Two artillery officers watched the scene from a trench, when one of them fell across his friend with a bullet through his head. Presently, into that somewhat awkward situation, over the crest of the ridge behind came the leading teams of the Australian guns. Now it was clear that something in this part had temporarily held up the programme. The Germans somewhere held a point from which they could see that column pass the crest. At once the lighter German shell began to fall around them. Far out with the infantry the artillery's own forward observing officer, looking back at that moment, saw the column coming over the slope—just as the Germans must have seen it—and saw that barrage begin to fall. As the information of it spread around among the German batteries concerned, one after another switched its fire on to that point, until the shells fell around them as fast as one could throw tennis balls from a basket. Away on the flank the barrage was beginning to fall also on certain British batteries. INTO THE BARRAGE. The barrage was there, and the men had simply to go into it, which they did without an instant's hesitation. The column for the first time broke into a trot. The drivers of iixe leading batteries getting well ahead toward their position, flogged their sweating horses into, and out of, and between and over shell-holes, driving as they had never driven before, almost lifting their horses by fcheir exertions. Battery after battery found its exact site. The ammunition was dumped—the limbers cleared back over the ridge. One battery near the crest struck trouble. One of its guns sidled into a shell hole, and no amount of flogging and driving could for the moment clear it. The team behind it was waiting, when a five point nine high explosive shell plunged into its midst and burst, killing or wounding every horse. Some Australian artist will yet paint the battle picture as it stood at that moment. The batteries in the lower ground ahead steadily firing up the ragged slope to the horizon; a battery in the foreground working its guns amidst the splash of frequent black bursts. PAST THE AEROPLANES. The' limbers were just clear away to the rear, and the guns had picked up their task and were working steadily ahead with it, with shells falling thickly around them, and the air full of whirring fragments, when there was the burr of a motor overhead, and looking up they saw an aeroplane wheeling below the low cloud not 600 feet above. It had black German crosses painted beneath its planes. As it wheeled over the batteries they could clearly see the airman, and the bombs, as one after another five or six of them dropped from the machine. They exploded harmlessly; other aeroplanes were most of the day flying and wheeling overhead—so many machines and so cramped beneath the cloud that their attention seemed to be occupied with endless wheeling, like that of a flight of great birds, to avoid colliding with others. The planes could scarcely tell English from German; most of them were English, but during the day six times some German aeroplanes in. that collection came swooping down over the batteries, firing machine guns at the gun crews who were shooting back with a couple of salvaged machine guns and some rifles picked up from the trenches. "They came at us with everything but submarines," as one. officer said afterwards. They fought all through the day exactly as though there had not been a" shell within the landscape—played their part in the big game, and kept their places precisely as did the more fortunate 'batteries elsewhere. The long bombardment of the week or more, ending with this furious day's work, had taken its toll. The officer who was killed early was an old hand from Anzac. He had been a medical orderly in the old 3rd Brigade thfere; and when two detachments of the old 7th had heen wiped out by the Turks' fire he quickly walked up to the guns and asked to be transferred and taken on as a gunner. He di»d as he would have wished —with his batt«ry in action in one of ibe greatest battles of iustory-,