HEAVY GUNS AT CAMBRAI.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LV, Issue 16798, 14 March 1918, Page 6

HEAVY GUNS AT CAMBRAI.

AUSTRALIAN BATTERIES.

SURROUNDED BY GERMANS,

Commonwealth Official—Copyright.

BRITISH HEADQOARTERB, Dec. 9. They were mostly men of the Royal Australian Artillery with some Australian Garrison Artillery embodied since the beginning of the war. We found thorn sitting disconsolate at a siege park—a sort of camping ground for heavy howitzers of all sorts and sizes. Guns In various stages of dismemberment were standing along tho roadside— which had evidently soma of them just emerged from a rough-and-tumble—some of them without breechblocks, others in pieces just as they had been extricated from some tight corner.

They had been twenty-two continuous months in the line. Thoy were the first Australians into a fight in France at Vimy ( in May, 1916. They were behind a British Division at the start of the Sommo battle, and then when the Australians came down to it they went in to support them. They were at Nieuport in the summer, and then moved down to Ypres for, tho tremendous battle. started on July 31. After a few days in a fairly quiet sector they were shifted suddenly and silently up to a position where it would normally bo thought impossibla for heavy guns to go. But tho weather favoured them exceedingly well. It was dry and hard for moving, and at the same timo so dull that the Germans could not usefully fend out their aeroplanes. When at dawn on November 20 the great moment came, and the tanks and infantry broke through, German guns firing at targets miles beyond the horizon, actually found that our trench mortars were firing over their heads. Within four hours the enthusiastic rush of that brilliant morning's work had carried the battle out of their range. Later two of the guns wero moved up to a position where they could still reach the requisite distance behind the German lines. It was on the tenth morning after this when the gunners wero preparing for the" normal routine for the day' that an infantry staff officer suddenly took a score of them and set them with rifles to defend a ridge not more than fifty yards' ahead of the | guns. Infantry was being driven back, and batteries of field artillery passed and took up a position just behind. A message came by telephone from the artillery headquarters in the rear to stand by ready to blow up the guns if tho Germans approached any closer; and then the telephone line was cut. The Germans who had broken through the thinly-held line further south were in possession of tho place where that headquarters had been. Machine-gun bullets began t'o whistle round—first distant shots, then gradually coming from shorter range, and more fall of purpose. Bullets sang past from the front, then from each flank, then from the right rear. Then a field-gun opened from a trillion almost between them and where their j group ' headquarters had been, and German shells came whin, ing down from their rear. The Germans must have i rushed their gun's through with their infantry, probably thinking that the effect of field-guns firing from behind their flank would cause our line northward of them to crumble.

When German shots began to reach them from a few hundred yards away the position of the cans was clearly critically dangerous. The only thing to be done was to make sure of destroying them before the Germans came any closer. This was dtone. Within an hour or two the British counter-attack had definitely stopped the German advance, and the guns have been recovered,