GUN-POWER.

Otago Witness, Issue 3312, 5 September 1917, Page 50

GUN-POWER.

TRIUMPH OF THE MUNITION WORKER. SMASHING THE GERMANS. Writing after tho capture of Monchy, Mr Percival Phillips, the correspondent of the Daily Express, says: Gun-power smashed the Germans between Arras and Vimy Ridge, just as it smashed them on the Sommo. I wish the multitude of redoubts and strange strongholds revealed by our latest breach in the German front could be preserved as a lesson for future generations. They would realise the better how machinery has triumphed over man in this great war. East of Arras the battlefield is thick with concrete forts and low-lying earthworks, each distinct in itself, yet a part of the ryassive German barrier thrown around three'-lndes of the town. There are square forts, round forts, and oblong forts; chapel forts, church forte, and cottage forts; forts sunk inconspicuously in the crater field with only a foot or uvo of loopholed machine gun emplacements visible at close range; torts rising boldly above the w T ire as though challenging obseivition; forts embedded in ttecp railway embankments; forts stuck in a marsh; forts of all sizes and shapes strewn about with discriminating generosity, monuments to the patience and blind coniidence of a mieguided army —and all in ruins.

You have only to look over this wholly blasted plain at the edge of Arras to realise how the munition workers of Britain helped to win this victory. The guns and shells they sent us have freed Arras and their own fighting men and set the armies again into open country, where they are completing the task so splendidly begun. Ruin, utter ruin everywhere. Bits of brick and mortaT heaved into formless masses; gaping holes and new mounds of earth; dead men in grey, twisted machine guns, powdered concrete, broken rifles, howitzers tilted at impossible angles, blackened treo stumps, bent rails, and splintered timber. Chaos and an appalling desolation. The picture cannot be imagined. The earth is convulsed and dead. The wonder of it is that any living thing could survive, much less try to resist, the force that was irresistible.

The end of this infernal bombardment, just before dawn on Easter Monday, was too sudden to be reassuring. All night long the British guns hammered and hammered at the crumbling city of forts, and then, as though by magic, the storm ceased. "The silence," said one officer, "was likea thunderclap! We drew long breaths and were thankful, although we knew what was coming. ... It was an unspeakable relief."

It was all too short for the dazed dwellers in the caves by Arras. The guns fell on them again with greater fury, and in the wake of this new barrage—greater and more nerve-racking than the steady pounding that preceded it—came the fresh and confident battalions from Arras and the British lines around it

I saw them sleeping in the fields or lying along the roads under a flaming sky, and pressing forward to the attack between midnight and daybreak, singing, whistling, joking, giving no thought to the uncertainty of their next hour, wholly glad to be alive, though death might march with them into the fields beyond. They were ghostly regiments moving steadily through the night—men in bonnets, men from the Midlands, men from all corners of Britain and her outposts, swinging along over the wet and shining road with a serene confidence that made the heart glad. They passed like phantoms. I heard their voices in the darkness —heard little scraps of their oheery talk, and the greetings of their comrades on the way. . . . Old Fritz is done for. . . . Going to do in Kaiser Bill. . . . Wish I was back in Man-chester. . . . Lumme, look at the sky; it's like the ruddy o!S Crystal Palace. . . . Wot cheer, mate!" I saw their faces flash into the flickering light of a roadside lamp. A camp of huts was there, and the soldiers who were not yet called to battle roused from their sleep to see the battalions pass. Their fifes were at the edge of the field playing the column by—three youthful fifors shrilling out a mubic-hall air and two drummers pounding fiercely as they grinned a welcome that could not be heard. I saw the column melt away again in the darkness beside the ramparts of Arras, the last man singing, " I want to go home," and marching with a zest to meet the enemy. ' One of the most obstinate of the surviving forts was that built in the so-called riailway Triangle immediately east of Arras. Its guns were still workable, its tired garrison still hostile. When our infantry came within striking distance they paused before a destructive fire.

What happened then is another triumph to the British {runners. The barrage, creeping before the infantry with incredible exactness, had passed ahead, being a blind though intelligent instrument of annihilation. Miraculously (it seems to an onlooker) the barrage was halted and turned back. "It was a beautiful sight," said a spectator who anxiously awaited its support, " a perfectly wonderful sight, for it came back ever th.» ground it had thrashed, as though led on a leash." The barrage halted on the Railway Triangle. It played about. Concrete splashed the waiting infantry; machine-gun mountings lobbed through the air. The barrage simply sat on the redoubt and it was not. Then* it resumed its interrupted journey into the unknown land and left the broken evidence of its handiwork to be dealt with bv the " cleaners up."