APREMONT

Evening Star, Issue 15906, 11 September 1915, Page 11

APREMONT

The- Bois Brule, in Apremonfc Woods, has been the scene of some of the. fiercest fight-, ing in the war (writes Lawrence Jerrold, in' the 'Daily Telegraph'). I walked for two hours there in the trenches, which at one point approach to within five yards of the Gennau lines. The drive to the woods of Apremont is a drive through ruins. The colonel receives us in the woods of Apremont, like a country gentleman showing us over his estate, and takes us for a wild walk through the labyrinth of trenches cut out of the stones and baked by the sun. We are joined by the lieutenant-colonel, a joKy person who has just received the Military Cross, and who whispers to us as a reward for the warm walk that he still has seven bottles of beer left in his dug-out. We are joined also by a jolly herculean captain and by innumerable subalterns, whose one employment for the moment seems to be snapshotting. They are all full of fun at the idea of receiving civilians in the trenches, and our visit seems to be an event. Of course, the guns are gong all the time, and so are the rifles, but that is all a commonplace. The two hours' walk in the trenches takes us to the edge of the Bois Brule. -The colonel kindly but firmly refuses to allow me to go nearer than 20 yards to the German trenches opposite. " Just over there you would be within five yards of them, and it is not a healthy place. You cannot even talk. At the least ,sound they throw hand gren- [ ades, which are very nasty things." A crack and a ping. "Hullo!" says the colonel, I "they seem to have seen somebody." "They" did this four or five times without hitting anybody. I looked through a peephole, briefly—"Hurry up!" said the colonel—and just saw through the poppies and blue cornflowers the German trench 20 yards ahead. From another and rather safer post of observation, one could see a few houses of a village and two willow trees. These are German posts of observation. But not the ghost of a Boche. They keep cover very effectually. Between the German and French lines is the Redoute du Bois Brule, formerly an exercising ground for troops in peace time, now a tiny position for which both lines have been fighting for months. All the trees are reduced to broom- | sticks. Near the redoubt still lie thousands of dead. Why not arrange a truce to bury them ? "We did once," says an officer, " and the moment our -men left the trench j on their mission of charity they were shot down. No more truces for the Boches. No more scraps of paper." French officers and men do not talk violently, but the spirit of determination and revenge in them is, I can vouoh for it, fairly strong> In that space between the trenches which I can see through the loophole, a French soldier—in peace time a schoolmaster —lay wounded. The enemy shot at him deliberately and persistently as he lay. Each time a bullet' hit him he cried "Vive la France!" Some bullets missed, and he said nothing, and did not even utter a sound. When the nest bullet went through him he called " Vive la France!" again. It lasted an hour or so, and then he died. His body is still there at the Redoute du Bois Brule. The officer who told me this very quietly, but I must say there was something of a grim look in his eyes.