MESSINES RIDGE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17089, 22 August 1917, Page 6

MESSINES RIDGE

HORRORS OF THE SALIENT. HOW THE BRITISH HELD ON. (By Philip Gibbs in the Daily Chronicle.) Wax Correspondents' Headquarters, nrpr June 12. ihe enemy must not get the Messines Kidgo at any price." 'This sentence stands .out as an absolute command in the German order issued to their troops before the battle w 4icn they knew was coming. Ihe words are poremptory, among promises of artillery support and immediate counter-attacks from divisions behind tho first lino troops, which would be road now as a hollow mockery by those men who are oui prisoners captured m crowds from theii welter of mined and cratered earth While half-way through the battle theii artillery tried to drag their field guns back to something like safety in the woke of heavy guns, which even before the battle had been withdrawn to the farthest possible range of action, though forward observing officers tried to conceal this from the innn7 y Col [ mn S **> their usual posts. The battle is over. Messines Ridge, which was not _ to bo ours at any price, is ours at a price which our army thinks very cheap—though many brave men paid for it with their lives—and our outposts are pushing forward towards Warneton, far beyond tho further slopes, after an enemy retiring upon that place. Only our men who have fought in the Ypres salient know the full meaning of that order. "The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price." r IMPORTANCE OF THE RIDGE. Messines Ridge was our curse, and the loss of it to tho enemy means a great relief to that curse by straightening out the salient south of Hooge, and robbing the enemy of direct observation over our ground and forcing his guns further back. From Messines to Wytschaete he had absolute observation of a great tract of country m which our men lived and died—how complete an observation I did not realise until after this battle, when standing in Wytschaete Wood and on the mount of St. Eloi and on r,ke ground rising up to Messines. I looked back, and saw every detail of our old territory laid out like 'a relief map brightly coloured. "My God," said an officer by my side, '"it's a wonder they allowed us to live at all." He had fought in the old days in the salient, had lived like a hunted animal there, hiding in holes from the monstrous birds of prey screeching and roaring overhead hi search of human "flesh. Before us now, looking as the Germans used to look, wo saw all this countryside, which is a field of honour, where our youth has fallen in great numbers, a great graveyard of gallant boyhood. The enemy couid see every movement of our'men, unless they moved underground or under the cover of foliage on Eemmel Hill and its leafy lanes, or behind the camouflage screens which run along tho roadways, or between, the.gaps in the. ruined villages. TWO YEARS' BOMBARDMENT. Startlingly clear wero the red roofs of Dickebusch and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses, into which for two years and a half the enemy has flung great shells, and the church tower of Kemmel. where the graves are opened by shell fire and old bones laid bare. The road to "Voormezeels and Vierstraate, through which I' went yesterday, are still under the old spell of horror at those obscene ruins of decent Flemish hamlets. Southward one saw Neuve Eglise,. with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street Wood, where bullets snapped between the branches about Piccadilly Circus and down the Strand and across to Somerset House, and where at Hyde Park Corner I first heard the voice of Percy, a high velocity fellow, who kills you with a quick bounce. German eyes staring from Wytschaete and Mossinps making little marks on big maps, talking to their gunneris over telephone wires, and registering roads and cross-roads, field tracks, camps, billets, farmhouses tucked into little groups of trees through which their red roofs gleamed, watching through telescopes for small parties of Briirsh soldiers or single figures in a flowered tapestry of fields between the winding hummocks of sandbag parapets, had all this qround of ours at the mercy of their guns, and that was not merciful. Day by day two years ago I used to see Dickebusch in clouds of smoke, and hated to go through the place. They shelled separate farmhouses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They shelled the roads down which our transports came at night, and communication tzenches up which our men moved to the front lines, and gun positions revealed by every flash, and dugs-outs foolishly frail against their frightful 5.9's which in early days we could only answer with a few weak squeaks Yet by somo extraordinary freak, not certainly by any kind of charity, for that does not belong to war, there were places they failed to shell, though they were clearly visible—little groups of Flemish cottages, with flaming red tiles, a big old house hare or there with pointed roofs rising above a screen of poplar trees, fields still cultivated, as I saw them yesterday, by old Flemish women who bent over the beetroots and hung out washing under German eyes and German guns, and went up and down with plough-horses close to our gun positions, and sold bad beer to English soldiers glad of any kind of beer in places where death was imminent and where, as they drank, the glass might be smashed out of their hand by a flying scythe or a yard of wall •'Why do you stay here?" I asked an old woman in Plug Street village a year, and ahalf ago. Four children played about her, though at the time shells were whining overhead and crashing but half a field away. "It is my home," she said, and thought that a good enough answer. "How about the children?" I asked, and sho said, "It is their home, and we earn a little money." MENACE OF DEATH. Even when tho last battle began those peasants still remained encircled by our batteries and with German crumps falling about their fields; blear-eyed old men gazed up at the sky, - watched the flame bursts of the mines, then turned to their earth again; and the 'battle itself was heralded at dawn by the crowing of cocks in little farmsteads somewhere down by Kemmel. _ Ohantecler the battle charge with his clarion rote, as in old dawns when English and French knights were drawn in line of battle. An officer who was with mo in Wytschaete Wood looked down at the'se old places where he had lived in tho menace of death and remembered his escapes that time when tho back of his dug-out was hit by a huge shell as ho sat in his pyjamas, smoking a cigarette; and that other time, when his servant was buried alive quite close to him and the nights and, days under constant shellfire.' But these little homesteads in or about the salient are few in their strange escape, and olsewhero there is not a building which stands unpierced or in more than a fragment of a ruin. Young ofnoers of ours lived within thoso ruins, wondering whether it would be this day o r next, now, as thov spoke or m tho silenco that followed, Bom'o beastly shell would lyrst through and tear down tho Kirkchnei prinis which Oiey had pinned to broken timbers, and smash the bite of mirror they used !or shavirg glasses and lay them out in tho i«ckago. HORRORS OF TRK SALIENT. When he goes home *ji io-tve aid sits at his own heprthsido- th-so dream pictures come back to him with • jeir old hurror as to thousands, oi men who hare fought in

M>n salient, like those London boys I me< one night in Ypres, cooking cocoa undej shellfire. like those King's Royal Riflemei J eaw going up to a counter-attack aftet the first attack by flammenwerfer, and the padre who went up to the canal bank at night and found five dead men ,in a Red Gross hut and not a soul alive about him, and the Canadians who fought through a storm of shells in Maple Copse. The horror of that salient in its old evil days lives in its sinister place names—Dead Horse Corner, and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug street, Dead Dog Farm, and the Moated Grange on the way to St. Eloi, Stinking Farm, and Suicide Corner, and Shell Farm Barn. I passed by some of these places and! felt cold in remembrance of all the ev3 n m l- Boys oi ours haTe been smashed in all these ill-famect spots. Every bit oi ruin here is the scene of foul tragedy to young life. To these places women will come to weep when the war is done, and the stones will be memorials of bravo hearts who came here in the darkness with just a glance at the lights in the sky and a word of "Carry on, men," before they fell. Roads are still sinister. ENEMY'S BLIND SHOOTING. The enemy can all shoot.across the saEent from the north. There is no certain safety anywhere yet But ont thing has altered, and it makes a world of difference, ine enemy has no longer direct observation oi the southern part of the salient, and by th* taking of Messines Ridge he has lost a great part of power of his evil spelL . -the enemy can shoot, and is still shooting into this side of the salient, but he is shooting blind, and his shells are aimless, and that is what makes all the difference between one's chances of life and death. It is_the reason why the German Command issued the order: "The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price." j i. haVe Baid ' the tables art = turned, and what he made our men suffer when ha had the observation and: the guns, his men will suffer now that we have the observation and the gunfire. He has suffered already terrible agonies and a bloody'slaughter, so that letters written by his men in their dug-outs and captured by. the sackful in this battle cry out to God for pity and for an end to all this misery. "We are now in this hell. One might believe that God would not allow it to go on any longer like this. I think we snail be relieved one of these days, as there are not many left." . " The English have comnletely smashed m the whole trench and all the dug-outs. I .was almost buried iri a dug-out yesterday. It was of concrete, and the English put a lew 38-centimctre shells on it, when it collapsed like a concertina. A whole crowd of men were buried and burnt. I cannot describe what it is like here. Soon there will,be no hope for us. We have a frightful lot of casualties; drumfire day and night, 14 days of it already. So we can't compete with the English." We are five days in the trench, fivo days in support, five days in trench again, then we go back for 10 days. Our division's losses are over 100 men each day. The enemy bombards the trench with aerial observation. The aviator flies quite low, as nobody dares to show himself." "We have been lying in an advanced position for 20 days, and I can tell you it is regular hell here, and one does not know what to do. There will soon be no wav of escape for us. The English smash lip everytlrng with their artillery, and we have fearful, losses."

We have an artillery fire here such aa yon cannot imagine. Yesterday 21 men were killed and seven wounded with one shot. Our artillery does not speak." "To-day (June 1) is now the thirteenth day on which our trenches and the ground behind are exposed to heavy fire. All the trenches are smashed in. No more shelter is to hand, as battery emplacements up to two metres thick are completely destroyed, and even six-metre-deep galleries are not safe from guns of heavy calibre. Thus we are forced into the open without any protection, and have to submit to the passage of a hail of iron. Our losses, therefore, are very heavy, and each day we must thank God that we are alive." AGONY ONLY BEGINNING. This is only the beginning of the agony ot the German soldier. Our gun-power great as it is now, is increasing in strength! Holding the Messines Ridge, we have observation over the ground to which he has been forced back, and any movement of ha troops is reported by forward observing officers to our batteries.

There is hardly a man in our army who does not pity, in spite of all the hate of war, these young Germans who are forced against their will, for they are all sick of the strife, to endure this prolonged slaughter which will not be spared them unless the scales fall from the eyes of their people, or unless the German Army itself revolts from unnecessary sacrifice and takes vengeance on those who have ordered it. That may happen, though it is unlikely; and so those frightful . hammer-strokes of ours will be repeated, and other fields will be strewn with'the dead, and the stench of death will be rising, as it now rises, in great stretches of upheaved earth, in which German hopes and German boys lie birried together.