MESSINES RIDGE

Otago Witness, Issue 3315, 26 September 1917, Page 21

MESSINES RIDGE

HORRORS OF THE SALIENT. HOW THE BRITISH HELD ON. (By Philip Gibbs in the Daily Chronicle.) War Correspondents' Headquarters, June 12. "The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any prico." This sentence stands out as an absolute command in the German order issued to their troops before the battle which they knew was coming. The words are peremptory, among promises of artillery support and immediate oounter-attacks from divisions behind the first line troops, which would be read now as a hollow mockery by those men who are our prisoners, captured in orowds from their welter of mined and cratered earth. While half-way through the battle their artillery tried to drag their field guns back to something like safety in the wake of heavy guns, which even before the battle had been withdrawn to the farthest possible range of action, though forward observing officers tried to conceal this from the infantry by coming to their usual posts. The battle is over. Messines Ridge, which was not to be ours at any price, is ours at a prico which our army thinks very cheap—though many brave men paid for it with theiil lives—and bur outpostß are pushing forward towards Warneton, far beyond the further elopes, after an enemy retiring upon that place. Only our men who havd fought in the Yprea salient know the full meaning of that order. "The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price." IMPORTANCE OF THE RIDGE. The Messines Ridge was our curse, and the loss of it to the 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 in which our men lived and died —how complete an observation I did not realise until after this battle, when standing ta Wytschaete Wood and on the mount of St. Eloi and on the 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 U 6 to live at all.*' Ho 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 in search of human flesh. Before us now, looking a's the Germans used to look, we saw all this countryside, whioh 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 Kemmel Hill and its leafy lanes, or behind the camouflage screens which run along the roadways, or between the gaps in the ruined villages. TWO' TEARS' BOMBARDMENT.

Startlingly clear were 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 § raves are opened by shell fire and old ones laid bare.

The road to Voormezeels and Vieretraate, through which I went yesterday, are still under the old spell of horror: at those obscene ruins of deoent Flemish hamlete. Southward one saw Neuve EjgliSdj 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 voico of Percy, a high velocity fellow, who kills you with a quick bounce. German eyes staring from Wytsohaete and Messines. making little mark* on big maps, talking to their gunners 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 British soldiers or single figures in a flowered tapestry of fields between the winding hummocks of sandbag parapets, had all this ground of ours at the mercy of their guns, and that was not merciful. Day by day two years ago I used to aee 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 tienches 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 wero places they failed to ishell, though they were clearly visible —little groups of Flemish cottages, with flaming red tiles, a big old house here 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 c»y 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 the last battle began those peasants still remained encircled by our batteries and with German crumps falling about their fields; blear-eyed old men fazed up at the sky, watched the flame urste of the mines, then turned to their earth again j and the battle itself was heralded at dawn by the crowing of cocks in little farmsteads somewhere down by Kemmol. Chantecler the battle charge with his clarion note, as in old dawns when English and French knights were drawn In lino of battle.

An officer who was with me in Wytschaete Wood looked down at these old places where he had lived in the menace of death, and remembered his escapes that time when tho back of his dug-out was hit by a huge shell as he sat in his pyjanias, smoking a cigarette; and that other time, when his servant was buried alivo quite closo to him. and tho nights and days under constant shellfire. But these little homesteads in or about the salient are few in their strange escape, and elsewhere there is not a building which stands unpicrced or in more than a fragment of a ruin. Young officers of ours lived within these ruins, wondering whether it would be this day or next, now, as they spoke, or in the silence that followed, some beastly shell would burst through and tear down the Kirkchner prints which they had pinned to broken timbers, and smash the bits of mirror they used for shaving glasses and lay them out in the wreckage. HORRORS OF THE SALIENT.

When he goes home on leave and site at his own hearthaide these dream pictures come back to him with their old horror, as to thousands of men who have fought in the-salient, like those London boys I met one night in Ypres, cooking cocoa under shellfire, like those King's Royal Riflemen I saw going up to a counter-attack after the first attaok by flammenwerfer, and the padre who went up tq the canal bank at night pd found five dead men in a Red Gross nut and not a soul alive about him, and the Canadians who fought through a storm of shells in Maple Copse. The hoiTor of that tialieiit in its old evil days lives in its sinister plage 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 evil of them. Boys or ours have been smashed in all these ill-famed: spots. Every bit of 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 brave 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 ali shoot across the salient from the north. There is no certain safety anywhere yet. But one thing has altered, and it makes a world of difference. The enemy has no longer direct observation of the southern part of the salient, and by tho taking of Messines Ridge he has lost a great part of power of hi 3 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." As I have said, the tables are turned, and what he made our men suffer when he 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 shall be relieved one of these days, as there are not many left." \ "The English have completely smashed in the whole trench and all the dug-outs. I was almoet buried in a dug-out yesterday. It was of concrete, and the English put a few 38-centimetre shells on it, when it collapsed like a coflcertina. 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, five 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 way of escape for us. The English smash up everything with their artillery, and we have fearful Tosses."

" We have an artillery fire here such as you 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. Thie is only the beginning of the agony of the German soldier. Our gun-power, great as it is now, is increasing in strength. Holding the Mossines Ridge, we have observation over the ground to which he has been forced back, and any movement of his 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 their will, for they are all sick of the strife, to endure this prolonged slaughter which will not bo 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 vises, in great stretches of upheaved earth, in which German hopes and German boys lio buried together.