WITH THE NEW ZEALANDERS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LII, Issue 49, 26 February 1918, Page 7

WITH THE NEW ZEALANDERS

STIFF FIGHTING AGAINST STRONG POSITIONS. : OTAGO AND 'CANTERBURY MEN IN ACTION. BRAVERY OF OFFICERS AND MEN. (From Captain Malcolm Ross, Official Correspondent with the New Zealand Forces.) BELGIUM, Dec. 8. After the Passchendaele fighting the New Zealanders went back to that quiet retreat whi-ch I described briefly in an article written on the 3rd. of October, and there spent three peaceful weeks in training- and recuperating. Recently they came again into the line not far from Ypres. They passed' through the famous ancient city, still strangely fascinating with its ruined houses and the shattered walls and towers of its cathedral and it s cloth hall, which, surely, should be preserved for future generations as an object lesson of German ruthlessness and destructiveness. You can motor well past the town now, and.' for some distance along the Menin road. Leaving your car you walk along a broad road and over zigzagging duckwalks across the open to our new front line. On every side are names that will remain for ever famous in the war history of this generation. • Zillebeke, St. Elois, Hill 60, Beceleare, Sanctuary Wood, and th e Chateau de la Hooghe ar e among them. Of the Chateau, of the hamlet of the same name, and of the surrounding woods naught remains. They hav e ceased to exist. The Belgian nobleman, six generations of whose family have lived in the chateau, would not now he able to trace the confines his demesne. His treasures of art, indeed all his belongings, have gone the way of the chateau. But the soil has become sacred to the British Empire. "Thrilling scenes," says Beckles Wilson, the Canadian war correspondent, "have been enacted in this park——the flower of the chivalry of England and' France have perished in its defence. ... It was to Hooghe that were borne the dead todies of Fitzclarence, Cavendish, Weliesley,. Wyndham, Cadogan, Gor-don-Lennox, Hay, Kinniard, Bruce, and Fraser, and not far from there they are chiefly? interred. Close at hand also is the grave of the brave young Prince Mauric e of Battenberg." Echoes of th© Middle Ages and stirring memories of the immediate past crowd in upon you as you go through the shattered town of Ypres, and the desolated lands and' hamlets. In the salient and sacred dust of men from the confines of Empire—of men from Australia and 1 New Zealand, has been mingled with this Belgian soil. SCENES OF DESOLATION. It was the dawn of a frostyi morning when We went through Ypres on the way to our front lin e trenches. Not far beyond the spot where we had to leave our car we entered' upon a scen e of desolation such? as it is difficult to picture or imagine. On either side of the broad rbad the fretted earth had been torn again and vet again by German and by British shellfire. Waves of battle bad ebbed and , flowed about a land that but a few short years ago had held smiling hamlets and green fieHs and woods. Now, over thousands of acres and trees and the grass and th e houses had been wiped, almost clean away. There were, it is true, a few rubble hea.ps of reddish brown brick denoting where houses had stood, and there were the branches and broken trunks of trees that told, where woods had been, but nowher e could you see any grass. The earth was bare and brown, it is a I land that has been wa -1 !>v the blood' of brave men. and r - ~ nv a long day there will be no harvest but the harvest of victory, for so sorely has the land l>een scarred bv trench and dug-out, "by shell-hole and mine

I crater, that no plough can surely enter it in our day and generation. THE ROAD OF DEATH. Not on any part of th e Belgian, British, or French front—l have not been to Verdun- —have I seen anything comparable with this destruction of hamlet, Wood, arid meadow land. The shell craters are rim to rim over square miles of countryside. In places even the edges of individual craters have been blown away with subsequent shell-fire, until they form irregular ponds with miniature peninsulas and archipelagoes of little clayey islands. This morning the ground lay frozen hard and the ice was an inch thick' on all the ponds. Men- had to break through with an axe or some stout stake to get water. Since the frost other shells have burst, scattering the ice on the road and the frozen clay. ! And then the water had frozen once more. There were 'ponds that had in their ice a crimson stain. On either j side of the road was the debris of furious war—broken waggons and gun- | limbers, barbed wire, unexploded shells, and dead horses with mouths agape. All were frozen into the brown soil, immovable. The sun came up over the bank of smoky grev horizon mist that prevails in winter time, throwing all this battl e wreckage into greater relief. It was through such a scene that our men -marched once more to the front, but one now passed it byi without a shudder, for custom has staled' the infinite variety of its horror. 'Of the protruding limbs or the hideous grinning fac e of some dead' German, halfburied, or disinterred by some new explosion, little notice is taken, for such are ordinary sights in our daily life. Beyond the road the track w r ound across the open, and steel-helmeted men passed to and fro carrying up material to strengthen the position we had won, or returned empty handed for stakes and wire, for ammunition, food, and water. Across the shell-torn land 'before the frost had come it was difficult to walk in the sticky mud, but now you could- cut off corners and' walk with ease —-so hard was the frozen ground. Rising gradually we approached the great mound or "Butte" where the enemy in his underground, stout-ly-timbered warren had withstood our heaviest shelling. The German gunners shelled it persistently. From th e Butte you got a wonderful view of the country wfe had conquered, and of the positions we have still to conquer. One marvelled more and more at th<j valour of the British armies in the field' in gaining ?uch.strong positions. The German may drive ba---k an Italian Army corrupted by' insidious propaganda, i"o may treat with impunity the armies of Russia in the throes of - red revolution, but all the time it must be a galling thought to him, in spite of all his generation.- of military preparation, he canned beat the British and the French, nay, more, that he must give way, fivm prvifiom that h e thought impregnable, before the valour and the skill of France a ritf of England. TO THE FRONT LINE. We pass across the open, threading . our way 'bet-ween the frozen pools that ' have filled the shell hol e s. Ahead, in the direction in which we are going, j the German balloons, high in the air, are observing. Planes fly overhead, droning as they g O . At times there is the burst of machine-gun fire from the sky, where friend and foe are engaged in uncertain combat. You pass . beside broken machines that hav P crashed to earth, or that have, in the words of the communique, been "brought down out of control," and think of the fate of the--daring pilot and his observer, j Do their graves li e near at hand? Are they lying sorely battered in some base hospital ? Or are thev in the air again, looking for fresh .adventure? We are getting near the front now, and dTop into a communication trench —the first we have see 1 ' in an hour's w-alk. Walkinrr the frozen humhas been like walking across + he literal moraine cf some great <ila- : cier. excent that the frozen clay and I °and are less slinnery than, the glacier ice, and. the colour is brown instead i of dark grey. . Inside the tunnels of the butte, when a battle is raging,

the noise of the artillery is like the continual roar of the waves as heard in some seaside cave. We have passed, a strong line of trench and wire, blown out of all semblance of a line by our own artillery. We have .noted the strong square block-houses and "pillboxes" that sheltered the German machine guns and their gunners, and again we wonder at the feat of British arms that has crowned this ridge with victory. Presently we are in the front line trench. It, too, is narrow and' sandy and dJ-y. As yet it is not revetted. At times the enemy sends a few shells to it across the waste of No Man's Land, and at night he mixes his shelling with poison gas. We have passed Battalion Headquarters, with its ,telephone wire leading to a hole in the ground. We lift the flap of the door and peer into th e gloom where the British commander is working by, the light of a candle. It is in the open, and is an uninviting habitation. For the time being, it is home to thes e greatly daring men from the Antipodean isles. But our Battalion Commanders are philosophers, if not fatalists, and one has even heard them in such circumstances quoting the refrain of the modern song -. j "Any old plac 6 where I hang my hat ; Is home, sweet home, to me." Only hats are not taken so far afield. Helmets of steel have taken their place and th e gas helmet is also very close at hand On the morning; of which I am writing the front line was comparatively quiet. A few enemy shells lobbed away to the left, there was an occasional stutter of machine-gun fire on the right, 'but only one shell fell near us-. | It was one aimed at the Butte on our j return journey. Yet there are times j w! en the road and the tracks up which j we have come are not healthy places j for a soldier, let alone a civilian. A j battalion commander told me that he | had cut out a hundred yards on that j road the other day in as good time as J he had ever done it in in his best sprinting days. With one of his officer?, he had got caught between two barrages, but, by timing the fall of the shells, they decided that they could just get through, and, making a dash for it, succeeded. The old idea of strolling unconcernedly forward in the face of shell fire is nowadays abandoned by the wise man. When tin shell fell near us on our return journey a Staff officer who was with me ducked. "I always duck," he said, "I've seen a man killed at five or six hundred yards by a splinter." "In the trench our snipers were constantly on the outlook. In their ownlanguage, they had got the Boche snipers down. With their boots swathed in sandbag wrappings, to keep their feet warm, they looked' like Shackletons in the South Polar regions. Some others were sleeping in little dug-outs in the comparatively dry sandy* soil, j with their feet 'protruding into the j trench through the sacking dborway. j One man was co-axing a piece of solidified alcohol into flame, to make himself ] a warm drink. lie had not been able j to sleep much because of the cold, but j he was quite cheery and interested, and j intent on the operation in hand. The j Germans were quite close, and had "been- ! putting out wire in the night time on j the edge of what had been a wood. Our j men sometimes got a glimpse of them j in parties of twos and threes and then j the rifles of the snipers rang out. Th e Divisional General with whom I made the trip was busy all the time studying the situation. He likes to , see "for himself, for that way success lies. In the course of the morning we j got extended views far into the enemy's terrain. On the horizon on .the left front there loomed up a ridge that : will not be easily taken. We saw- Moorslede, undestroyed, amidst its .'trees; the "broken buildings of Gheluvelt and. its ridge; and,, fronting it, Poldleroek Chateau, near which brave men- of the New Zealand Division have fallen. But of this more anon.