OLD AND NEW METHODS.

Clutha Leader, Volume XLII, Issue 24, 21 September 1915, Page 1

OLD AND NEW METHODS.

The changed methods of trench warfaro in Flanders are explained in an interesting; way by Mr G. Valentine Williams, the brilliant war correspondent, in one of his l recent contributions to a London paper. War by machinery is blended -with the rough-and-ready methods of primitive fighting, hand-to-hand grappling with knives, and bomb and sap, which had all but passed out of our military knowledge. The war on this front is practically a succession of sieges; every line of trenches is in itself a series of defence works. A tremendous concentration of big explosive fire may cut a way through, and then under a. curtain of shrapnel fire the assaulting infantry can occupy the first line of trenches. Then the trouble really begins. The captured enemy position has to be consolidated, or in other words the German trench has to be turned the other way round, the parapet being heightened and the back lowered and machine guns set up and ammunition stores established. All this has to be done under heavy bombardment, the range being known to a hair, Mr Williams thinks that automatic rifles would prove the best means of effecting an establishment, what time the enemy is endeavoring to regain, the lost ground by countex-a>t-taoks helped by bombing and machine gun fire. In the meantime fresh infantry pushes its way forward to capture the 6econd line of trenches-, their path being through the communication trenches as it is impossible to go forward in the open against machinegun fire. Here the bombers come into action, lobbing their ibombsi round the traverses., and then rushing round to complete their work with knives or bayonets. Bayonets have been found to be too long for these desperate encounters in narrow and slippery trenches and so the short knife, practically a dirk, is being employed, especially by the French. It is said that bombing in this war began with a man filling a bully-beef tin with explosive and pitching it into a German trench, and' now bombing has developed into one of the most important branches of trench warfare. In this hand-to-hand fighting the British soldier revels and from all accounts usually establishes his personal ascendancy. But at the same time the description of such a method of warfare shows very dearly that it is a long way to Berlin df the way has to be through Flanders, unless sonre new m«thods can be inaugurated.