AT ASPACH LE BAS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 10060, 3 May 1915, Page 8

AT ASPACH LE BAS.

UNNAMED HEROES OF ALSACE. GALLANT RUSH* ON GERMAN TRENCHES. Comparatively little has been recordod of tlie heroic deeds of our gallant French Allies on the Alsation border of the Republic. In the following moving narrative, M. Andre ludesq, the Daily News special correspondent, who has "spent some tune on the frontier, lifts the veil a little and fells of feats which are worthy to rank with the most noteworthy in the-annals of the French army. The story he tells of the sacrifice of brave lives in the endeavour to take Aspach le Bas is one of the most thrilling of the war. EASTERN FRONTIER, Feb. 6.

"They will enter into history, unnamed," but full of glory, as the 27 victims of Aspach le Bas!" Thus saying, the captain handed me his glasses. "A great crime," he muttered. I looked through the loophode of the trench an dmade out three spots on the field of snow—human forms lying out under the open sky. An Alsatian village .west of Thann—houses with facings of woodwork and gabled roofs of thatch, in which the .storks love to nest in spring—in two ports, Upper Aspach and Lower Aspach, 80 hearts, all told, with a mile and a quarter of gardens and vineyards, a railway, and a stream, the Doller, separating them. Such was the setting. No difference as to level. It is the stream which decides whether you are in "High" or "Low" Aspach. In the beginning of December we held Aspach le Haut, and the Germans Aspalh le Bas. On either side the trenches, leaving the line of the houses, converged towards the narrow, reedy bed of the Dolley. Five hundred yards or more as shooting range. Twenty-five Days Spadenset- mbdmb TWENTY-FIVE DAYS SPADEWORK. We were strongly located behind the railway, the enemy as strongly entrenched on the edge of the thickets along the Schweighausen road. Twen-ty-five days passes drearilyb in spadeWork and a brush with the enemy from time to time.

' On Christmas Eve the men were relieved. In the first trench of outposts was now a section of the 43rd Territoriaiw, of Ep*nal. Among them was Serigeant J. Oberreiner, an Alsatian, who liad been born in Aspach le lias, and knew every stone and every tree of the countryside. As he looked through his loophole he could see with his naked eye the familiar roof and croft. He entreated the captain to order an attack that very night. At /5 a.m.. while the mists hung heavy over the valley, the section—27 all told —left the trench and ad'vanced en tirailleurs. Creeping noiselessly on with fixed bayonets, each man holding a grenade in his hand and clippers between his teeth, the gallant 27 reached the barbed-wire fence. W-ith infinite precaution the first palisade was forced. All at or.ee bells, artfully dissimulated here and there, tinkled the dreaded warning, in a moment, betrayed and blinded by searchlights, before they had even bad time to shoulder their rifles, the 27 were swent awav.

\Vlu i ii the morning broke, those of the doomed party, who, though severely iMnmilril, were yet alive, were observed dim king a supreme effort to get through ihe barbed-wire and reach shelter. A salvo from the German trench put several of them out of their misery, but seven were still left, desperately wounded, and almost unable to move. Tliey were in two groups. Three had sufficient strength to get out their bandgages and dress one another's wounds. These poor fellows were lying side by side. Twelve yards, away the Hermans insulted them. It was now broad daylight. From the French side some stretcher men now wont forward. Hying a whitehandkerchief and showing their badges. They were unarmed. The Germans tired, and the two leaders were wounded. Jsut the. wounded out there could not he left to die untouched. Something had to he done to save them. A big Red Cross Hag was hastily manufactured and run up at the end of a pole. A hospital attendant determined to make another attempt. On the very edge of the trench a bullet pierced his brain. He dropped dead, and the Hag with hint, pierced and torn. 'J hat evening the ooOth of the Line and the (sth Chasseurs made two furious, but vain, attempts to rescue! their dying comrades. All night longj the Germans relentlessly kept theirj searchlights playing on the doomed,] and sweeping the expanse up to the| French lines. The sight of a shadow brought salvos Innn their trenches. ] The French officers could hear the | feeble groans ol the dying. Sergeant' Oberi'oiner —the Alsatian —was heard imploring the enemy in their own! tongue to succour his comrades or finishi

llicm off. "Water!" eric;! one. A Krench olfieer pledged nw his word of honour thai the reply made front tin: German trench wa.s, ""'fa houcl? ■ bebe!" —a slang expression equivalent to "Shut your jaw!"'—which showed that the speaker was a German who had been employed in Paris —as a waiter, ! perhaps, in some Montmartre haunt. HIS DK-ATH SOX (J. So Christinas Day passed. On the morrow, at dawn, the French officers by the aid <>l their glasses could see that Obem-iiier alone was still alive. His face was tinned towards his native villagfc. He was attempting, for the last time, to bandage his wound. It was freezing, and he d:ew himself close to his dead eonirad 'i. At four iii the afternoon, after 3o hours' of agony, the order rang out strike up the "Watch am Rhine" —to drown the accents of the "Marseillaise." which Oberreiner was singing with his last breath. . . . The French still hold Aspach le Haut, and the Germans Aspach le Has. The German searchlights continue to play all night. As though bent on depriving tiie '27 dead of Imriel, the Germans have refused live requests for an armistice. i have seen the three mounds lying out in the plain. The snow has tenderly made them a white shroud. Below their breath the peasants are reviving old legends. They say that on .January Jti, in the Thirty Y( n is" War the soldiers of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and Duke Charles of Lorraine fell fighting! on theis same spot. They are nowrising from their eternal sleep to fight their battle over again. But in their time war was noble. To-day it is a crime, and the spectres are fleeing.