THE MORNING AFTER

Otago Witness, Issue 3275, 20 December 1916, Page 46

THE MORNING AFTER

A FLAYED HILLSIDE. ANGELS' WORK. (By Captain O. E. W. Bean, Australian War Correspondent.) (Copyright Reserved by the Crown.) BRITISH HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, August 28. It had been a wild night. Not a lirstrate full-dress attack on a big front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have been so frequent on tho Pozieres ridge. Along a good part ot the lino the troops were back in the trenches they had left, or had dug themselves a new trend) oidy slightly in advance of it. At other points they were in tho trendies they had gone for. In other places still—weli, nobody was quite sure. Tho bombardment which had been turned on as though somebdy held the key to the thunderstorm, and which had crashed and flashed into the hillside nearly all the night, had gradually died down. Tho artillery staff officers on both sides had long since read the last signal form, had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had turned into bed. The norma early-morning gun was sending its normal shell at intervals ranging up the long valley—rattle, rattle, rattle, until the echo died away up the slopes like that of a vanishing railway train. As it died, another gun would bark, and another, until for a few seconds tho noise dwindled and died altogether, and there was a silence as n somebody, just for a second or two, had stopped the battle. The German Artillery Staff had left its gun barking, too. Every now and again the shell came and spat over the hillside. s " The morning broke very pale and white through the mist, as though the earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare. The soft white hand of tho mist covered the red land, so that, you could see no more than two or three hundred yards at most and often not a hundred. We were stumbling over ground smashed in bv the lart night's fire—red earth new turned. Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of tho mist—you could see the crest rising dull jrrey out of the white vapour in tho dip between. That hill-crest was in German territory—not ours. For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench. OUT OF THE MTST.

It was while we did so that I noticed a little grey procession coming towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German lines. They came very slowly—the steady even paoe of a funeral. The first was a man—a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman who marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a flag. Behind him came two men carrying very tenderly and slowly a stretcher. By them walked a fourth man with a water bottle. They were the stretcher-bearers bringinff in from out there some of the wreckage of the nio-ht before. We wont along the trench further, and at, a later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front oi the line A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist was pecking regularly there, sniping from some German outpost, and it seemed not wise to show yourself too freely —the mist was lifting, and you never knew whether the Germans wore this side of it or not. But though those bullets peeked constantly at the small parties of stragglers, the little procession with the flag passed through unharmed. If the sniper saw them he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else. A BLEEDING COUNTRY.

"We made our way back, when wo wont, across a hillside literally flayed of aJI its covering. ine barrage of tne night before and of other days had fallen there, and tho slope was simply a ploughed Held. I could not get rid of that impression, at tho time, and it is tho only one that I have of it still—that wo were hurrying up a ploughed countryside along a little, irregular newly-made footpath. We had come out upon a road and crossed' it at once. After a second or two's thought one realised that it was a road, because the banks of it ran straight. It had been like coming on the body of a man without his skin—it took you" some time to realise that this flayed thing was a road at all. There was a shrapnel sheel regularly spitting across that country. We knew we would have to pass it, and one was naturally anxious to bo under cover at tho moment. At this time I noticed on our left a little group of figures, faintly soon in the mist, attending to some job in the opon. Wo came in sight of the trench wo wore making for, and these figures hailed us, asking the way. They wore standing above the trench, intent on some business that needed care, when the expected shell whizzed over tho hill and burst. I ducked. The men standing on the brink above tho trench there did not even turn a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no more heeded them than if it wore a schoolboy pelting mud. They wore intent on their business, and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench to get into, but only to show them the way. Their burden was carried easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.

INTO THE BARRAGE. We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a short cut. Five minutes after we had set out the Germans happened to turn on their barrage across a patch where our aged trench seemed certain to lead. There may not have been more than 15 shells in the minute, but it seemed looking along that patch, more like 30 They were of all sorts mixed—ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the crash of a big shell; little spiteful pointone shells, Hinging up fountains of it. Wo pushed on until the trench petered out, and the shorter shells were already bursting behind us and the trench was little more than a crater to nip into, when you heard them singing towards you—and then we decided to give it up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive into the sea. A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench, perfectly snug, watching the storm. As wo reached that trench and turned into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of five others who were standing up

there already in the open. They were stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to them. They were stretcher-bearers —Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting" theirs up there. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.

I learned more about Australian stretcherbearers that morning than I had ever known since the first week in Gallipoli. I cursed my fate that I was not permitted to have a camera there to prove to Australians that these things are true. As luck would have it, the next time I saw that same scene the British official photographer was beside me. We saw the smoke cf a barrage on the skyline, and, coming straight from it. were two little parties, each headed by a flag. " NOT MEANT FOR US." Wo hurried to the place—and there it ia on record in the photograph for every man to see some day, just as wo saw it; the little party coming clown the open, with the angry shells behind them. I asked those stretcher-bearers, as I looked up at the shells bursting, how the Germans treated them.

"They don't snipe us so long as we have this flag," one of them said. '"Yon see. we started it by not firing on theirs when they came out to their wounded. Of course we can't help artillery," he added, looking over his shoulder at the place from which ho had enme. where a line of black shell-bursts was fringing the hill; "that's not meant for us."

Load after heavy load, day and night, mile upon mile, in and out of craters, across the open and back again—assuredly the Australian stretcher-bearer has not degenerated since he made his name glorious amongst his fellow-soldiers at Gallipoli. Hear them speak of him.