THROUGH GERMAN EYES

Otago Witness, Issue 3327, 19 December 1917, Page 25

THROUGH GERMAN EYES

HORROR ■ AND CONFUSION

THE MESSINES MINE EXPLOSION

In fighting for their victory at Messincs many of our men must (Mr Keith Murdoch writes) have paused, when time gave them chance for thought, to wonder what the Germans thought of it all—not that they care what such people think of anything, for these are past human considerations, but because it is in the nature of men to wonder what their deeds look; like from another angle. iwmn German prisoners to the number of 700 U testified to the strength and vigour of our attack. German war correspondents are now testifying to the irresistibility of the •whole battle movement. Most characteristic of their descriptions is that of Professor Wegener, the correspondent of the Tageblatt at the front. The following is a "translation by Mr J. E. M'Kenzie, formerly correspondent of The Times in Berlin : "STRAIN HAS BEEN TERRIBLE." Professor Wegener depicts a certain Major von' B and his staff retiring to bed exhausted on the night of June 6 " The thick walls of the dug-out deaden the sound of the cannonade outside that has been going on for weeks, and they provide a certain security, although no complete security against hits from the heavy English guns," he says. " But it is impossible to think of the refreshment of serious sleep, one can only doze uneasily and feverishly. The strain of the last days and nights has been too terrible —more than one ever thought human nerves could stand. Since the end of April the enemy has increased to an extraordinary degree the fire of his artillery in the Wytschaete bend. He must have brought up an astonishing number of guns and fabulous masses of munitions, and now he is playing with them the old game which we know so well from the beginnings of the Champagne, Somme, and Arras battles; before ho proceeds to a feneral attack' he wants thoroughly to estroy not only the positions, but also the nerves of the defenders. What our troops endure is terrible and superhuman. Under the shower of shells and grenades the defensive works of the trench lines, which were constructed in a year of work, melt away or are transformed into a chaos of earth, supports, planks, iron girders, and a maze of barbed wire. . . AIRMEN IN SWARMS "The operations are prefaced by innumerable enemy airmen, who, at the beginning of the preparations for attack, suddenly appeared hero like a swarm of locusts and swamped the front. They also worked on cunningly calculated . methods. Their habit is to fly in three layers—one quite high and with their little machines almost invsible " from the ground, one in the middle, and the third quite low. In this way they are almost always able to menace our airmen from several sides at once. Just as at the beginning of the battle of the Somme, the English airmen who fly lowest show an immense insolence; they come down to 200 metres or even less from the ground, and shoot a.t our troops with their machine guns, which are specially adapted, to this purpose. We, on the other hand, fight them from the ground with rifle and machine gun. " The English artillery uso poisoned gas on a large .scale. They fire a great deal with gas shells and gas mines, which they aim with great precision. It is true that our gas masks have proved excellent; if they are rightly used and. put on at the proper time they completely keep off injurious effects. We have very few casualties duo to the enemy gas, destructive though it is, except in cases when the mask is not put on in time, for two or three breaths are enough to kill. ... ." , GREAT MINE EXPLOSION.

Wegener then comes to the morning of June 7: —

"Perhaps the worst thing of all is the permanent tension. When will it come, and in what form?- It is as if one were living on the edge of a volcano, with unmistakable evidence that an eruption is imminent, but with nothing £o betray the exact hour.

"It is 4.15 (German time). There I Something terrible, something unprecedented has What is it? A tremendous blow nas thrown the dozing soldiers out of their beds straight up into the air They try to cling to the bedposts and the walls. But these also are in motion, as if they were alive; it is hardly possible to keep upright. The blow is accompanied by a terrific crash, not so very loud, but so powerful and of such a kind as has never been heard after the explosion of the heaviest enemy shell or mine torpedo. " Major von B described to me how ths foundations of his dug-out, built deep into the ground, were set in motion like the cabin -of a sjwaying ship, and then one had 'the horrible feeling as if oneself and everything also were sinking into the ground. It turned out afterwards that tho gigantic crash and earthquake camo from an English mine explosion which had taken place about a kilometre away,_ on ground held by a neighbouring division —an explosion on a scale hitherto, unknown in 'this war. It was only the mos't northern of a whole number of similar explosions which the English had carried out along the whole Wytschaete bend."

DEVILISH REFINEMENT,

Wegener says that the Bxitish preparations had been going on for a year, and he repeats tho usual argument that the iground was unfavourable for German counter-measures. He insists afresh upon the successful explosion of all the mines at the same moment, and upon the tremendous force of tho explosion, and proceeds:— "It was a devilish refinement that the whole thing was let loose in tho darkness in order to increase the horror and confusion, but just at the end of the- night, so that immediately afterwards, at the first break of dawn, the drum fire which directly followed the explosion and was to complete the chaos could bo introduced by air observation of the most effective possible kind. Tho calculation was good, for it is obvious that anything so terrible must have a disastrous effect on nerves so strained, and it is not surprising that the imaginations of those concerned exaggerated their own impressions, and that people talked of whole companies and so on flying into tho air—imaginations which have since turned out more and more to be erroneous.

"But the enemy's calculation, although good, was not good enough. There can be no question of a complete demoralisation of our troops on the whole line or of complete break up in defencelessness,. such as

was hoped. It is well known that in the midst of this hell, and even where the bursting of the dam was worst, islands of tough and heroic resistance maintained themselves everywhere, and our men, with unshaken nerve, did serious damage to the Englishmen. Indeed, it becomes more and more certain that the enemy suffered extremely bloody losses from the savage machine gun fire of these bravo fellows and from other kinds of resistance, as well as from our long-range artillery flanking fire:"