WORLD’S GREATEST DRAMA

Evening Star, Issue 15882, 14 August 1915, Page 6

WORLD’S GREATEST DRAMA

THE FLANDERS BATTLEFIELD. A GIANT GAME OF CHECKERS. Press of America publishes the followmg article by its correspondent' the British Army, Mr William G. Shepherd:— Northern France.—Lurch in the little Belgian village which this morning has had its first taste of German shell fire wasn’t appreciated bv me. Three of General French’s flying men sat at the table across the way. My quarters were blown to hits this morning, said one. “I don’t suppose I ve got a comb left.” A worried-looking young woman, dressed in black, came up to see us. „ “ I J can ' :t , give you much,” she said. Madame lias gone, and the cook has gone, and the woman who washes the dishes has gone, too,* A Canadian soldier had seated himself near ua “Everybody eating, in spite of shells/* he said, in tones that were strangely American. “ Ho had ceon, from another part of the trenches, the German gas fumes. He said they rolled up in clouds. The clouds were manj-cnloied. The men who were laid out turned blue and gasped for breath. Their lungs hurt them. It was like inhaling fire. “ I didn't used to be so sure of those outrages m Belgium,” he 'said. “ But now, by I believe it all.” His words rang with a tremendous earnestness. Mo went, back to the hospital at 1.30. A minute later the doctor came out, gave orders to the driver, and climbed into the car. Wo started off, while the doctor ransacked a canvas bag, and hauled on! some ci ackers and a can of preserved meat. —Battered Belgium.— He had heard officially of what had happened in the town. Twenty shells had Iwen fired,_ and then one of General French s British batteries had been ordeied to find that German battery and silence it.” J With the long fingers of their shells the British artilleryman had felt out the German guns and had stooped tho German tornado. M hot her the German guns, had lieen, blown up, or whether they had stopped firing in order to hide their whereabouts from the British battery, was not known. But the point was that they bad stopped I began to understand, as we sped out of the town, why the Belgians I meet revere Bir John French’s soldiers, the men who batter Germany because Germany battered Belgium. —View of the Battlefield.— “ We’ll run up this hill and see how it looks,' said the doctor. “We seQ the whole British line from here.” Ten minutes later wo were on the top. There s O.stend,” said the doctor, “and the English Channel. You can see the white line of the surf. Here’s Ypres and here’s Armentieres. ” There before ns stretched 60 miles of battle line. And on 15 miles of it the fiercest and greatest battle in the history of warfare was being fought between the British and the Germans. It was tho first day of the new summer wav. The deep roar of a hundred storms throbbed, in the air. Wo tried to take in the view and its vast significance in one general survey. It was impossible; clouds of smoke hero and there; the thunders oi guns. The eyes and ears took them in, but ii was all so vast that my mind remained unmoved; it couldn’t respond to such t tremendous stimulus. Men were dying in that landscape, I knew. Others were fighting like devils; human life down on the great plain was' being quoted at zero; it was being given away free. Down there on those checkered farms, along those canals, in the groves, on the roads, men were killing with might and main. Shells flew near Poperinghe, six miles’ from Ypres. A huge blade cloud came up from the earth, in its suburbs. This meant that a German 17in shell had burst there. The residents of that town had flown after experiencing all tho terrors and the heart straining that came to the people of the little town we had visited in the morning. “Thera goes a ‘Jack Johnson* in Ypres,” said one of tho party. We saw the black flash of a German 17in shell break' near the Cloth Hall tower. Wherever we looked in the half-circle of Flanders that spread before us shells were breaking and fires were burning.