FEEDING ARTILLERY

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 97, 25 April 1916, Page 7

FEEDING ARTILLERY

SCENES ON VERDUN ROADS

TROOPS IN GREaAhEAET.

GENERAL PETALS' WORSHIPPED.

All along the roads that lead to Verdun the smelL of battle is in the air, writes Mr. H. Warner' Allen from the front on 9th March. Some 20.000 motor lorries a day are passing, along these roads. To them must, be added guns, caissons, and horse-drawn commissariat carts of every description. Yet everything passes swiftly along, and the roads arc scracely ever blocked. Motor vans loaded with men trundle along, each five yards behind the other, and it is amazing how few breakdowns there are. All this traffic ha 3 necessarily cut up the roads badly. There were several, inches of mud on them that could worthily compare with the mud of the trenches .—mud with the density of thick soup, which splashed over everything and everybody. Everywhere gangs of men* were' hard at work rcmetalling the exhausted roadways, throwing piles of stones into the slime—stones that wero promptly crushed in by the passing cars. All these men were working feverishly, without a moment's respite, knowing that their task was of vital importance to the defence of the threatened fortress. Every now and then one would fall upon an artillery column bound for the front. Guns of every kind atifl descrip-tion—evil-looking little 75's, long, graceful sin-guns, and squat, murderous-look-ing Bin howitzers were to be counted in tens and twenties, and them were such stocks of ammunition as passed all beliof. MOUNTAINS OF SHELLS. By ths side of a. mountain of big shells, piled evenly.one abova.tke otlwj.rows of

ammunition-wagons were standing, their horses breathing hard after their journey from the front. Speedily, like clockwork, the wagons were loaded up, and dashed back again, to provide the gunners with fresh means of destruction. A revietualling station on » strategical railway offers an extraordinary sight during a great battle. Train upon train comes puffing in, loaded with the strangest medley of materials—fodder, petrol, barbed-wire, provisions, guns, ammunition—in fact, every tiling that the complication of modern war demand. At the station which I visited all the men were in a state of great joy and satisfaction. Thuy had just heard that Navarre had brought down his sixth German aeroplane. "PREPARED TO DO THE IMPOSSIBLE." Headquarters in this district are stationed in an unlovely village. -The roads are deep with mud, and the air, too, is full of it, thanks to the splashing of tho . motor-cars as they pass. Food there is in abundance, but comfort there is none. Every officer under the rank of captain has to sleep on straw, but no one minds. Comfort is replaced by something far more essential—confidence. A . little ripple of satisfaction runs across the bodies of blue-coated men grouped in the streets when General Petain, with his alert step and all-seeing eye, passes across the road. Every soldier within fifty miles of Verdun believes in Petain, worships his strategical powers, and is prepared under his command to achieve tho impossible. A minute or two later, perhaps, the tall figure of General Heir moves swiftly and silently towards his quarters. He ha« studjed warfare in all its aspects. He, followed personally the Balkans campaign. It was he who organised the review of poilus Mr. Kipling has described in his "France at War." AN HISTORIC REVIEW. "That review,-" he told me, "was perfectly appalling from many points of view. The men were bearded and dirty, uniforms were muddied and tattered. They had a miserable band, in which practically every instrument had a- bullet hole through it. And yet," he added, "nothing in my life has ever moved me so greatly as to see those lines of infantry, who-had been fighting doggedly for weeks in the trenches, sweeping over the crest of the hill, with a- momentum that nothing human could stop."