IN THE TRENCHES

New Zealand Times, Volume XLI, Issue 9534, 16 December 1916, Page 11

IN THE TRENCHES

ON SOMME FRONT BRITISH TROOPS AND THEIR FINE WORK. SPIRIT OF CONFIDENCE AND SUPERIORITY. Tlie following article from on authoritative source gives a closely observed and vivid account of life in. tho Allied trenches on the Somme front. It is eloquent of the all-pervading spirit of confidence and superiority animating officers and men alike in the British forces now advancing slowly, but steadily, towards the Rhine: It may be worth while to say just what a man will see, and what hp is likely to teal, if he visits the Allied front line hear the Somme, at a point where the British Army has just mane one o£ its many steps forward. TV reach this point he must cross, brat, a belt ot derelict land, and then a belt of desert. The derelict land begins about three miles behind the Allien'’ old front, their front as it was till the Ist of July. On this belt of land German shells used to fall. Thev did not fall everywhere, but they might fall anywhere. So it has not .been cropped for two years, and has gone bade to prairie. Where not worn bare by feet, hoofs and wheels, it is all one rolling veld of thistles, and coarse grass. Vind wild flowers, and self-sown, shoots of the old crops of mustard and corn.

From this waste of gay colour and verdure you pass, almost at- a step, into the belt of sheer desert. The sten is made where you cross tho old Gorman front trench. From here onward the ground is naked and raw, and pitted all over with shell-holes, like, a badly pock-mark-ed face. In the villages almost every house has been ground down into a mess of bricks, and half the bricks 'into brick dust. The trees are broken half-way up their trunks, and all their side branches lopped off, the ragged stumps look like tho ends of old gardeners' brooms. Ihis was done by the Allies’ guns in the fast week of June. It was the heaviest cannonade in the history of artillery as the German cannonade at Verdun had been in its time. A few weeks more and no one will bo able to see what that first desolation was, for already the grass has begun to grow over Fricourt, as it does on the floor of the Cloth Hall at Ypres; and the sap of the trees, _ baulked of its natural outlets, is bursting out everywhere from the bark in thousands of little overfed twigs. THE BRITISH STEAM ROLLER. Across this desert you work your way up a road where British troons have being laying the best of macadam, mend tho bad parts, and British steamrollers have worked it well in. You presently come within range of the German guns, and you hear a shell or two burst in a wood, some way off on one side,-or perhaps on a part of the road, where nobody is. For there is £ German aeroplane m the sky, to ten the German gunners where to aims onlyfar up, out of hearing a couple of British aircraft, moving in great circles <( vor the whole field of battle, policing the sky; and behind you above the horizon, a long row of British, captive balloons, strange shapes, like maggots half-uncurled, ceaselessly watching the ridge towards which you are mounting. Soon you take it for granted that German shells miss, and as each one comes down on some new vacant space and sends up its haystack-like block of black smoke and its fountain of flying bits of metal and earth, you reflect on its cost to the German taxpayer. _ The ridge where you know that th« front line will be is a blunt ridge and not the sharp crest that it seems, as a ridge always does, when seen from off. As you near it the slope np which yon have walked eases off into a gentle convexity like tho top of a very small world. Then, over the ridge and far beyond it. there lifts into .sight another ridge covered with trees'which guns have not touched. They are the woods on the heights north of the upper waters of the River Ancre. op which our own ridge looks down from the south. *~o the ton must be near and the battle front with it. You take to a trench to approach it more safely—any one oat of many trenches that lead to the firingline will do—and walk with your head two feet under cover along a neat crack in the earth with a sharp corner every few yards, till you turn a last corner into the actual firing-trench. A MODEL TRENCH.

It is a trench to gladden the connoisseur’s heart. How the men must have worked whenever they were not fighting —and digging is less dear than fighting in tho soul of youth—in order to model this perfect lino of defence and offence—its shapely firing-step and clean-cut, vertical walls, and massively squared traverses ! Hero is no gaping V-shaped ditch to collect the enemy's trench mortars and invite his wandering whizbangs in. And the men know it. You walk along tho trench and see a just pride, as well as confidence, in their tacos. It is noon now, and some of them are blowing on hot tea to cool it or eating out of their dixies a hot stew of meat, potatoes, and peas. It has not always been thus in an English firingtrench. The English only learn war in each of their wars by degrees. But now they have learnt it. The day is fine, and other men are asleep, basking like cats, in a state of beatitude, on little sunny shelves and bunks, cunningly sculptured out of the trench's firm clay walls. One little knot of men off duty are bonding over a comic paper at a corner —the wary old trench-dweller always likes a corner, because he can jump round it at tho shortest notice, and put a solid angle'of earth between him and anything noxious that drops in on the other side. Another group have cheerfully reopened that undying theme of debate among British soldiers—tho merits and demerits of the salient at Ypres. "How long was you at Wipers?" "Four month." “Well, I was there five month, so what right have you got to speak?” A general laugh greets this method of proof, and someone else cuts in. You meet officers anxious about nothing except to know what there is in tho last English papers. Tho sentries on duty, with all the crowns of their grass-green steel helmets dipped cunningly down to the parapets's level, report that nothing is stirring .over the way. These helmets used to be ugly- and not highly protective; they looked like the barber’s basin that Don Quixote took to be the helmet of Mambrino. The new make of helmet is more vretty and also more virtuous. It covers more of the neck, though not so much as the blue steel skull-caps of tj»e French, with their turnod-oown brims, and *its lines are an artist’s. Worn at the proper angle, it makes a comely young sentry look rather like Donatello’s "David" at Florence, with the stooping head.

The sentries report nothing doing. That means nothing visible, nothing audible Peering over the parapet for a moment, you gee onlv a wilderness of bare earth, pitted thickly, like those of other fields lowea«down, ivith conical or pyramidal holes, from three to eight feet deep. Four hundred yards away is the skeleton of another dead village. No sign of life is to be seen out there, except nerhaps one of the larks which sin,? cheerfully here through cannonades that make pheasants nervous in faraway Sussex, or else a big hawk slowly quartering the ground ami sending the larks into a retirement as modest ns that of the German airmen this August. And yet von know that the waste is in-

fested; that you need only raise your head a foot higher to bring a bullet dipping itself -with a quiet flick in the loose earth behind you; that, if you crawled out on your stomach and'peeped over the edge of each shell-hole you reached, you would come at last to one in' which men in wide-skirted grey tunics with narrow red bands round their caps, are crouching, some of them nursing their one good friend, the machine-gun; some of them digging hard to connect hole with hole till a row of fortuitous dots is turned into a line; some of them, resting, tucked intq little cavities scooped in the earth on the near sido of tho whole, like sand-martens’ nests on the wall of a quarry, and staring apprehensively up at the bomb-laden British biplanes wheeling about in the sky overhead, as the larks la the grass look up at tho hawk. TALKS WITH PRISONERS. You know all this because on tho way up this morning you talked with a number of Prussian and Saxon prisoners in one of the “cages”—little camps of tents or good huts, where tho latest captives rest for some days, safe out of rang© of their friends’ heavy guns, till they can be sent on by train to tho ba«e or fo England. Three days ago they came down broken-norved to the “cage,’’ their faces fined and drawn with mental overstrain^-some of them still mechanically making deprecatory gestures of surrender and entreaty as they marched To-day all the lines wore smoothed out; they had been fed and found that the murderers described to them oy tbolp own sergeants inflict nothing but offers of Virginia cigarettes. So they had begun to expand in the unexpected sunshine of good treatment, and they told what life had been like in tho shell-holes—its good points and its bad. The food had been good, but sometimes it did not come, because the British guns would draw a kind of fence of falling shrapnel across a piece of country; a sort of shower-bath of bullets dropping along a line, so that nobody ccum cross tho lino without being hurt. Still, the bread and tho meat and the chocolate, when thev did come, were good, and the water was sometimes water in bottles. The trouble was that tho British guns would not cease fire, and that the British aeroplanes would not go away, nor the Gorman ones come out of then sheds. Sometimes tho men in a shellhole would sec British troops in the open, within rifle range, but would not dare to shoot, lest a British airmail should sep whore they were and send word to a British gun,, and bring down a high-explosive shell on the old shellhole, to bury them ,all alive by a second re-arrangement of the earth. You perceive that this apprehension is just, because you have twice to-day seen the end of a stiff, black-booted leg protruding out of the wall of an old shell-hole. Other questions about their life at the front the prisoners answered as freely. "Had they talked politics!” Yes; there were any numbers of Social Democrats in the Army, and everyone thought that great changes would come when the war was over, but not now. “Were there any desertions?” No; many men would be glad to be prisoners, but would not desert; many, more still would surrender If German officers were not so quick to shoot men who put up their hands, and if all German soldiers knew that the Allies do not kill a prisoner nor have him scalped by savages. WHEN THE BARKING STARTS. Those, then, are the kind of men, and that is the life and tho state of mind, which exist beyond tho throe hundred intervening yards of blank ground. On some early day, perhaps, the incessant sequence of separate shell bursts among and around them at intervals will change in an instant into an outburst of furious, continuous barking, like a suddenly angered dog’s, or that of a groat many suddenly angered dogs. The earth of their trench and in front of it and behind it will begin to dance up in fountains, like the surface of a puddle during very heavy rain, only that all tho earth fountains are twenty feet high. Perhaps the Germans will just be able to see through a hole in the smoko that tho British parapet, where not a sign of human habitation had been seen before, bristles with men standing up at full height- and then moving forward. In the next twenty minutes many cap-ricious-looking fates will befall individuals on ' both sides. But, underlying this seeming confusion, in the destinies of atoms, causes will still be having their natural effects. The average German soldier, having endured defeat already, will fight less well than he did. Hia nerves, having suffered tho strain 01 thosg. new experiences in the shell-holes, will hold out less long than they used to. His mind, having learnt that surrender into the hands of. Englishmen does not mean death or ill-usage, but merely release from danger and exhaustion, will be less averse from surrender than it was. The German Army naturally scored last year by being quicker than the Allies to see that success in trench warfare is to tho side with most munitions. It made the war a competition in munition making, and it has been distanced in that competition, and now the wide advancing line of English infantry will enter a German trench shattered out of shape as no Allied trench has ever been shattered, even at Sjrdun. Causes will have their effects, ongh sometimes it may not seem like it. However long the war may yet last, it has begun to have the character of a winding-up. Even a minor English attack on a short length of trench near the Somme begins to be recognisable now as one of the many forms that have to be gone through, 6ne after another, in liquidating a business clearly bankrupt.