CAVE-MEN’S WAR.

Mataura Ensign, 22 January 1915, Page 5

CAVE-MEN’S WAR.

Hundreds of thousands oi hrencluueu are to-dav living the life of cave-dwellers all the wav from Arras to the southeastern corner of the battle-line (writes George C. Curnock iu ‘The Daily Mail’), they°live as their fathers lived thousands of years ago. They dig holes for themselves in the ground, or seize savagely holes already dug, roof themselves in, with earth, straw, and boughs of trees, anything which affords a shelter from rain and keeps them hidden, from the eyes of the enemy. La these holes they‘eat, and sleep_ for days at a time, emerging only at night. I have talked, with men who have spent day® and weeks in this sort- of life. Yesterday I found one, an Englishman, snugly lying between linen sheets in a Paris hospital with a gaping hole in his leg and' his head swathed in many bandages—marks of the tearing, bursting German shell which came last week into his cave. • v- ■ This cave, out. of. which’ he- crawled last Thursday, is in Craonng, a land where no correspondent" has yet penetrated, a district in which we have “pro-; grossed slightly” for some weeks oast. .Be has been sitting or lying for day® at a. time in g. long hole dug in the side of a hill hy a company of sappers. ,He has 'bad his rifle for company and some 20 comrades who also lay or sat . all day and all night in the same long hole. Occasionally the sappers would return stealthily by night with their picks and spades and mole-like would start burrowing at one end of the french. When they had finished their work lie and 1 his comrades would move up into' the new trench.

A Foot Gained is a Foot Held.

There has been method' and purpose, in this work. , Each visit from the sappers has meant a few yards nearer the enemy’s eaves or nearer the, corner of a. wood, on the abutment of the long, sloping hill. In the early days o'f this war the corner of the wood would have been rushed hy infantry, shrapnel or mitrailleuse, and when the corner was gained the whole would have been shelled out again by the enemy’® big guns. The cave-dweller's method is slower, but it is a good deal surer, and it means that a foot gained is a foot field.

While this Englishman, -who has been fighting in the foreign volunteers’ regiment under the French flag, lay in his trench with his pipe and an old uevvspaper for company, he could hear all day long 1 the ,scream of French shells passing*over his head and falling upon the enemy’s lines* and the plunking, sound of the {Herman shells digging holes on the hillsides all a pound him. As he picturesquely put it, “you eouklu’t walk a dozen yards’without falling into one of them; the ground’s all pitted in holes up there!” , As you listen ‘to a. story like this—thestory of William Darcy, late rink instructor at the Magic City and now officially a much-wounded soldier in Hie -Trench Army—yon wonder . how any man. can stand the strain for weeks at a time and then turn up smiling likeDancy in the British Women’s Hospital. But of course there are compensations, espeCailly when you are brigaded with a merry lot of Parisians who in other days would! bo selling goods in a big store or singing- songs at a. cafe concert on ’Montmartre, or .teaching law in a university, or doing any one of the thousands of things Paris does for a living or amusement.

Club-law in the Trench. There is one set of trenches in which these gay Parisians have started.a club, the Troglodytes. They have a set of rules, and if some are a little reminiscent of the boulevards the rest are plain enough. The club member is, for example, warned that ho must hot play chess (echoes —no “checks” allowed!) or draughts (jen dd dames—no ladies allowed!). A member may put his foot on the seats of couches, but he must hot- take his hoots off. The rule against .strangers is very 'Strict—only iiiicmbofs of 'tile French Arhfy ; admitted and Germ an shells strictly barred. Not Very funny, you think! .Well, it tabes a sound humorist to he amusing in the trenches. . For humor of the-.grimmer kind the trenches are already famous. A recent visitor to the trench was allowed to peer through a spy-hole with glasses and see, not many hundreds of yards away, a couple of little .sixpenny French flags fluttering in the breeze .within 100 yards of the German trenches. “One of our men crawled out last night and stuck ihem -there,” said his guide. . “Preuv bit of work, was it not?” “And wUpfc are those heaps lying beside them ?” asked the visitor, still peering through the glasses. , His friend laughed ..again, “Four Germans,” he said. “Ea.ii of them thought he could get those.flags.” In more Hum one place this grim little comedy lias been played. .Near another line of German trenches a. Free ;’i flag Hies from a tree. 'Hie daring climber get back to his lines in safety, ,and a. German has been “caught in the act” of trying to pull the Hag down. General JoflTe recently allowed ns to know that the trenches in some parts of the Argonne arc only 40 yards apart. In such a place messages, shouted or written, are often.sent from the French to the German lines. A favorite joke is to cut out a beetroot in the caricature of the Kaiser-, stuff it with printed bulletin's of French and Russian, victories and sling it by hand from one side to the other. So fixed and regular does life become ■in these trenches alter weeks of residence that tlie more daring spirits will go qnb at night and set snares for rabbits" within 100 yards of the enemy. One Zouave writing home tells how he went out one night to his snares and found a German. l in the act of stealing his rabbits. “The bega.gr had lour of then,” complained the Zourve, “so 1 took him along-.with me—the thief! — the rabbits too; you may be sure I did nob forget them.” Thus it goes on day alter day in thousands of trenches—laughter and death hand in hand—along a line of more than, 200 miles, and so it may easily go on all this winter, with snow in the trenches and death outside them. And whew the fierce fighting is over in the north the same life of siege, will begin for the British Army ns well. It will be the trenches of Sebastopol over again . Those who arc si til wondering wliat they can do to help the. men who are fighting in France should set to work again and make still more wanri clothes and devise still more means., of keeping alive the men in the'trenches this winter. It is the army which, comes best out of them in the spring which will win its way to the next big victory.