WHAT THE CAMERA REVEALED.

Northern Advocate, 20 April 1915, Page 7

WHAT THE CAMERA REVEALED.

On the Kaiser's birthday his troops made a determined but unsuccessful, attempt to storm the British lines between Bethune and La Bassee and the French lines between Soissons and Berry-au-Bac. Tn both cases it Avas announced that the enemy had been repulsed with "heavy slaughter," but the latter expression is so frequent in the official war reports that it has ceased to have any special significance. However, the proof of what "heavy slaughter" means in this war has been brought home to the minds of many people by the subsequent publication of photographs of these two battlefields, taken by British and French officers after the engagements. In both instances the scenes of these "minor engagements" were covered with German dead for hundreds of yards, the distorted corpses lying in heaps and mounds in some parts of the field. A British officer referring to the carnage that took place in the German ranks in the engagement before La Basse says that the British gave ground, by orders, so that the Germans - 1 might be lured on. The ruse succeeded perfectly. The Germans rushed eagerly forward. Then the British 18-pounders which had been artfully concealed, spoke, the British infantry dashed forward, and the Germans were hurled back on all sides. "Their losses were terrible." said the officer. "One could see nothing but dead Germans strewn all over the place in heaps." As tho German remnant, after the engagement, -limped back to the German trenches, some of the British soldiers, with grim irony, played "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland" on month-organs.