WITH THE FRENCH

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 96, 24 April 1916, Page 3

WITH THE FRENCH

FALSE TRADITIONS

GREAT DEFENSIVE FIGHTERS.

The French Army is as impressive to an Englishman as the British Navy to a Frenchman (writes H. S. Gullett, Australian correspondent with the French Army). The French excel on the land, as we do on the water. The accidental defeat of 1870, when there was a temporary failure of French leadership, has been foolishly accepted as the failure of the French soldier, and as marking the deterioration of the whole people. Capably led, as he has been m this war, the French soldier to-day has no superior in the world, and, measured in millions, no equal. The army as you see it is a marvel of strength and efficiency. This war is the destroyer of cheap and false traditions, and among others that must be abandoned is the tradition that the French were not defensive fighters. The truth is that their offensive quah- i ties are so magnificent that we have been j wont to deny them any defensive merits at all. SOLID METHODICAL QUALITIES. The French on the defensive have proved themselves possessed to a surprising degree of those solid methodical qualities which we liked to believe were the popular attribute of the British. The thoroughness of the French defences are positively, depressing. You find it hard to, believe that an army which looked for an advance within 'the near future would have expended so much design and hard labour and money upon the line of trenches which it at present occupies. On the British front you get the idea that we have been perhaps a little, too optimistic; that we had hoped each week would bo our last on the ground now occupied, and that soon we should be occupying positions further east. In tho French lines you are almost led to think that the people of the Republic are reconciled to a new and fixed frontier. Their trenches have not only a sense of completa security, as far as the German offensive is concerned, but also an atmosphere of homely comfort. One mind seems to have designed and executed the whole system, just as one exalted impulse dictates the supreme sacrifice, 'if need be, for its defence. When you observe the thoroughness and duplication of the French defences there is borne in upon >you a deeper conception of what we have to overcome on the German side before we reach that victory towards which we are striving, and j which on this front at least we are surely attaining. Because wo know from the German trenches already captured by the Allies that the enemy, too, excels at the defensive, althoughl such a confession means .the overturning of much popular, misconception in England at the commencement of, the war) when it was believed that the German machine would fail if it could not constantly go forward. But in the French and German lines today there is this difference—the French' have during the war enormously increased their man power, while their artillery and machine guns are multiplied from month to month, and their munitionment is now ample for every need; the Germans, as we have the best of reasons for believing, are diminishing every day in man, power, and no longer increaso as they did in guns and munitionment. Already the advantage is with the French and the British, and increasingly so; in the course of time this advantage will become sufficiently overwhelming to make progress practicable, and then war will be over. The French laugh if you tell them that their lines have an atmosphere of permanence. Thy are as confident of travelling east as the British, but they are perhaps a little more careful of the lives of their soldiers than we are —a little less sporting when it comes to vital things—-and so they have excelled with engineering and navvying, just as they have with their artillery and infantry. , EXTRAORDINARY DUPLICATION. At one part of the French line we visited a General, who told us that the total length of trenches, including reserve trenches and communications, on a front of 17 kilometres made up no less than 400 kilometres. The actual front line was multiplied twenty-three times! All of this trenching would be of usual depth; in addition there would be numberless great dug-outs, or rather caves, and machine gun emplacements, perhaps a few redoubts and scores of fortified houses and posts. A single French' redoubt would before the war have brought curious travellers from all over the world to marvel at the resourcefulness displayed | in its creation, at its apparent maze, and yet its perfect system. We went down many steps far into the darkness, with boarded floor and timbered sides and ceiling, passed along a gallery for perhaps fifty yards, and then ascended into the open of a little square village churchyard, surrounded by an old stone wall some three feet thick and eight feet high. We were well behind the front line, but here, with its galleries and walls and trenches and its communication with the shattered village alongside, a force might have sur-*1 vived for days, possibly even weeks, after the front trenches had been carried. . Thousands^ of troops might stream past on either side of the redoubt, but so long as it stands and can work a few rr>n chine guns the doom of the enemy is certain. These islands have a hundred times stood unmoved amidst the wild flood of the invaders, and by their cross-fire have first arrested and then reduced the enemy battalions to chaos. Their strength being underground, they are proof against days of shelling by the heaviest of artillery, and when they are, reduced it is by hand-to-hand fighting of the most 'terrible and bloodiest nature, which takes place with bomb and bayonet and fist and fingers and teeth in dark underground passages. The one of which I write was a typical French countryside cemetery in war-time. Hero and there a shell had violently uprooted the, rest-ing-places of generations of villagers; new crosses stood above soldiers' graves, which, although within a few hundred yards of the enemy's lines, were fragrant with fresh flowers. I noticed the. grave of a young German airmail, and remarked to an officer that it boTe its cross, and 'was carefully tended. " There is still some chivalry left," I suggested. "Yes," ho replied, not without bitterness, "but only between the flying men. The German L aviatorts appear to have escaped kultur,

We care for their dead, and we know they do for ours." It is well that this should be so, for when the heroic airman falls, dead or wounded, he falls nearly always among his foes. A SINISTER PINE FOREST. We climbed a steep hill densely covered with a pine forest extending over thousands oi acres. Our mission was a visit to formidable batteries of heavy guns, and as we followed a winding unmade footpath through the pine's we wondered how the great guns were ever got into position. There were numbers of monster guns, and the hill, was occupied by hundreds of men, but. so skilful was the concealment that you might have passed over, it many times and seen nothing more than an occasional soldier. At a shout from the officer eager artillerymen leapt like goblins from holes about the roots of the gloomy pines and sported maliciously round the guns. >■?<■ •>. Touches from deft fingers, and evil muzzles raised themselves slowly but surely, for the top of. the hill was between .them and" the enemy. Words of command rang out strangely in the stillness of the peaceful forest; a thunderous crash; a pause for a minute as it seemed, and then came the dull, boom of the shell' as it burst miles away in the country of the enemy. The officer spoke again; the men went back to their caves, and silence fell among the pines. So operates the decisive machinery in the war. AN OBSERVATION POST. As we climbed up towards an observation post we passed a 'jagged hole in the turf which suggested that some huge hellish iron hand had reached down and clutched earth and rock and roots at random. Our guide smiled. "So far," he said, "they, have not succeeded in finding us, although they are always shooting." We had glimpses of telephone wires and wireless installations, and boxes of keen earner pigeons.' The telephones are sufficient communication between the observers.and their batteries upon peaceful days liku this, but should an attack come with its hurricane, of shells, destroying even the underground telephones and wireless stations, the piget>s might mean the saving or the carrying of a position. Should the pigeons be destroyed, there are still the old-fashioned signallers and runners, and after them detailed pre-arranged timetables. And 'yet, despite all this, we know that in nearly every serious attack on trenches in the war, artillery and infantry have sooner or later lost their connection. That is the commonest cause of chaos and failure.