FRENCH ARMY THE BETTER.

Press, Volume LI, Issue 15453, 4 December 1915, Page 2

FRENCH ARMY THE BETTER.

AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT'S OPINION. APPALLING SCENES OX THE CHAMPAGNE FRONT. Mr E. A. Powell, the "New York World's" correspondent with the French forces, is convinced that General Joffre's war machine is now better than the Kaiser's was at its height. He writes on October 21: Hell holds no horrors for one who has seen the battle-field of Champagne. Could Dante have been beside me during these last three days he would never havo written tho Inferno, because the hell of his imagination would havo seemed colourless and tame. The difficulty in writing about it is that no one jvill believe me. People will accuse mo of imagination and of exaggeration, whereas the truth is that no one could imagine, much less ex- j aggerate. the horrors that. I have seen, j

A stretch of rolling moorland, five miles wide and fifteen lons, which has beer, converted into a slaughter-house, a cesspool, and a garbage dump combined—such is the battle-field of Champagne. Barring the Manic, it is doubtless the greatest battle ever fought and the bloodiest. In the neighbourhood of a million and a-half of Frenchmen and Germans took part in that battle, in which Europe-lost, more men in killed and wounded than fought at Gettysburg.

Imagine, if you please, a gently rolling plain with occasional heights, none of them much over 100 ft in height, and wandering in and out between those ridges tho narrow silver ribbon of the Marne. There is scarcely a region in all Fiance where a great battle could have been fought with less injury lo property, for the few villages that dot the plain aro wretchedly poor, the trees are stunted and seragglv, and even tho grass seems to wither aud die of a broken heart. The soil is chalkv, and you liavo only to scratch it to leave a vivid scar. This was the great manamvrc ground of Chalons, and it was good for little else, yet only a few miles to westward begin the vineyards which arc tho chief wealth of this part of France, and to tho cast is the beautiful forest of tho Argonne. I think the thing that impressed me most about the battle of Champagne was the enormous amount of preparatory work done by the French before a gun was fired. It is said tha,t close to 3000 field guns were concentrated along those fifteen miles of battle front, and that behind each of those guns were stacked 2000 shells. In order to bring up the vast amount of ammunition and supplies the French built a macadamised 1 highway forty feet vide and nine* miles "long across the rolling plain. That the huge masses of infantry for the attack might reach their stations without being annihilated by German shell-fire they dug ten miles of communication trenches eight feet deep and wido enough for four men to walk abreast. Imagine the work that Was entailed, not onlv in assembling so vast a forco oF men and guns .and horses, but in providing that force with food, water, fodder, clothing, and ammunition.

BUSIEST SPOT ON THE GLOBE. The battlefield of Champagne is the busiest spot of its size on the face of the globe. It looks tike the Canal Zone at the rush'period of its construction, like the Greatest- Show on Earth multiplied 1000 times, getting ready for an afternoon performance. The roads behind the front for twenty miles are filled with troops and transport trains; long columns of sturdy infantrymen in pale blue coats and wearing the new steel helmet, which makes the French fighting man of to-day"so startlinglv resemble his ancestor, the men-at-arms of the Middle Ages; brown-skinned men from North Africa in turbans, and black-skinned men from West Africa in rakish red tarbooshes; sun-tanned colonial soldiers, soldiery from Annam, Tonquin, Somaliland, and Madagascar, wearing 011 their breasts the ribbons of, wars fought in lands of whom most people have never heard; spahis, from Morocco and Algeria, mounted on desert horses as wiry and active as themselves: sailors from the fleet brought to handle the big naval guns, swaggering along Avith the roll of the sea in their gait; dragoons in linencovered helmets with horse-tail plumes

hanging from them ; field batteries rockinc and swaying over the stones; postoffices on wheels, telegraph offices on wheels, butcher shops on wheels, Uaner shoos on wheels, garages on wheels, field kitchens, with smok» pouring from their stove-pipes and steam rising from sou« cauldrons; great- herds of cattle and woolly waves of eheep, soon to be converted into beef and mutton for tho hungry soldiers; pontoon waggons, balloon outfits, machine-guns, pack trains, mountain batteries, ambulances, world without end. Tf tho roads behind the front are crowded, so are the fields. Here a battalion of Zouaves at bayonet practice is being instructed in the terrihlo "haymakers' left." over there a brigade of Chasseurs d'Afriqu© is encamped, the long line of horses and the hooded waggons looking like vast gipsy encampments. Tn tho next field a regiment of Moroccan tirailleurs has halted for a rest, and the men, kneeling on their blankets, are praying with their faces turned Mecca-wards; just beyond them the huge yellow* bulk of an observation balloon is slowly filling.

FRENCH WAR MACHINE BETTER. Whero all these hordes of men are bound for, what tlicy arc going to" do, no one seems to know o r care. They are merely cogs and wheels and bolts and screws in a mighty machine which is set in motion and controlled by a quiet man in a general's uniform sitting at a table in a farmhouse many miles away. I was with the'Germaii arniv during its inarch across Belgium into I assert with all tlie emphasis that I can put into the assertion that I consider the machine which the French have so painstakingly built up during the past year bettor than the German war machine ever been. The destruction wrought by the Ircnch artillery fire is beyond imagining. The earth is nit ted with the craters caused by bursting shells, as is pitted the face of a man who has had the smallpox. Any one of these shellholes was large enough to hold a barrel, many of them would have held a horse. I saw one caused bv the explosion of a mine, which we estimated to be seventy feet deen, and twice that in diameter. In tho terrific blast which caused ft 000 German soldiers perished. At point, on what had been the German line, I saw a yawning hole as large as the cellar of a good-sized apartment house. It market! the site of a German blockhouse, but the blockhouse and the men who composed its garrison had been blown out of existence bv a torrent of 300 seventy-millimetre high explosive shells. There are no words between the covers of a dictionary to describe what it must have l>een like within the German lines under that rain of death. "THE MOST HORRIBLE SIGHT.'' The captured German trenches presented the most horrible sight that I iiad ctci - seen, or ever expect to sec.

This is ;iot rhetoric ; this is fact. Along the whole front of lifteen lailes the earth is littered with torn steel -shields and twisted wire, cartridge pouches, dented helmets, belts, bayonets, some of them bent double, broken waggons, bits of harness, cartridges, hand grenades, aerial torpedoes, knapsacks, bottles, splintered planks, sheets of corrugated iron, which had been turned into sieves by bursting shrapnel, pieces of machinery, trench mortars, blood-soaked bandages, fatigue caps, entrenching tools, stoves, furniture, pots of jam and marmalade. water-bottles, shreds of. clothing, and, most horrible of all, unburied portions of what had once been human beings. Going through an abandoned trench, T stumbled over a mass of rags, and they dropped apart to disclose the headless, armless, legless torso, of a man. I kicked a hob-nailed German boot out of my path, and from it fell a rotting foot. A hand, with awful, outspread lingers, thrust itself from the earth as though appealing for help for its dead owner. I peered inquisitively into ft dug-out, only to be driven back by an overpowering stench. A French soldier, more hardened to the business than J, went iu with a candle, and found the shell-blackened bodies of three Germans. Claspod in the. dead lingers of one of them was a postcard from a little town in Bavaria. began '"Dearest Heinrieh,—You went awav from us just a year ago to-day. I miss you terribly, and pray hourly for your safe return.'' Tlio-rest we could not re&d. It had been blotted out by a horrid crimson stain.

The battlefield is dotted with tiewlymade mounds and little wooden crosses. Scrawled in pencil on one of tjiese pitiful little crosses I read : —"ln brave, Emile Petit. Mort au champ d'honnem\ Pri'ez pour lui," Six feet to the left was another cross which marks the place whom sleeps Gottlieb Zimmerman, of the Wurttemberg Pioneers, and underneath, in German script, that vcrse,from the Bible which says. ''I have fought a good fight." Close by was still another little mound, under which rested, so tho headboard told, Mohammed ben Hassen, Bazazou. of the Fourth Algerian 1 irailleurs. ' They rest there, quietly, side by side. Frenchman, German, and African, under the soil of Champagne, wliile somewhere in Franco and in Wurtcmbcrg and in Algeria women are waiting and watch inp and praying for Emile and- for Gottlieb and for Mohammed. LOCKED IX TURRET. The most significant thing that I saw in Champagne was a steel turret some eight or nine feet in diameter, and perhaps Cft high, a smaller edition of thoso on battleships. Access to the interior was had through a small iron door at tho back, and insido was mounted a quickfirer.

This turret was mounted on the German trenches in such a position as to flank any frontal assault, but the terrific pounding of tlio French batteries soon put it out of business. After the storming of the German position it was found that tho door of the turret was., fastened on the outsido by a chain and padlock. Breaking it open the French found insido tho bodies of three Germane. They had been locked inside the turret hv their officers, and left there to fight and die with no chancc of es-. cape. When I was with tho French armies In Alsace, in the summer the French officers told mo of having found in captured positions German soldiers chained to vtheir machine-guns. I doubted the story at the time, but I doubt it no longer. Jn fact, I have seen so many strango and. almost incredible things in this war that I no longer doubt anything. Darkness was falling rapidly when I turned my back on the groat battlefield, and the guns were roaring with redoubled fury in what is known on the British front «s "the evening hate" and on the Frcncli lines as "the evening prayer." As I emerged from the communication trench into the high road, where my car was waiting, X met loflg lines of infantry, ghostly figures in the twilight, with huge packs on their backs and rifles on . their shoulders, marching briskly in the direction of tho thundering guns. It was the night shift going on duty at the slaughter mills.