NEW ZEALAND SECTOR.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLII, Issue 11471, 25 February 1918, Page 7

NEW ZEALAND SECTOR.

LINE NEAR THE MENIN ROAD,. BATTLEFIELD IN WINTER. New Zealand Correspondent’s Message. Belgium, Dec. 8. After the Passcheudaele fighting j the New Zealanders spent three i peaceful weeks in training and recuperating. Recently they came I again into the line not far from ; Ypres. They passed through the j famous ancient.city, still strangely | fascinating with its ruined houses and the shattered wallsjaud towers of its cathedral and its Cloth Mull, and for some distance along the Monin Road. On every side are names that will remain for over famous in the war history of this generation. Zillebeke, St. Eloi, Hill 00, Becelaere, Sanctuary Wood, and the Chateau de la Hoogo are among them. It was the dawn of a frosty morning when we went through Ypreo on the way to our front line trendies. Not far heyona the spot' where \ye had to leave our car we entered upon a scene £of desolation as it is difficult to picture or imagine. On either side of the broad road the fretted earth had been torn again and yet again by German and by British shell-lire. Waves of battle had ebbed and flowed about a laud that but a few short years ago 3i«d held smiling hamlets and green fields and woods. Now, over thousands of acres the trees and the grass and the houses had been wiped away. There were, it is true, a few rubble heaps of reddish brown brick denoting where houses had stood, and there were the branchless and broken trunks of trees that told where woods had been, but nowhere any grass. The earth was bare and brown.

THE ROAD TO THE FRONT. The shell craters are rim to rim over square miles of countryside. This morning the ground was frozen hard and the ice was an inch thick on all the ponds. Men had to break through with an axe or some stout stake to get waiter. Since the frost other shells had burst, scattering the ice on the road and the frozen clay. And then the water had Dozen once more. On either side of the road was the debris of furious war —broken waggons and gun limbers, barbed wire, unexploded shells, and dead horses with mouths agape. Ail were frozen into the brown soil, inmovuble. It was through such a scene that our men marched once more to the front, but one now passed it by without a shudder, for custom has staled the infinite variety-of its horror. across the shell-torn land before the frost had come it was difficult to walk in the sticky mud, hut now one could cut off corners and walk with ease—so hard was the frozen ground. Rising gradually we ap preached the great mound or ‘"butte” wlere the enemy m his underground, stoutly-timbered warren had Withstood our heaviest

shelling. The German gunners shelled it persistently. From the butte there is a wonderful view' of the country we had conquered, and of the oositions we have still to conquer. Inside the tunnels of the butte, when a battle is raging, the noise of the artillery is like the continual dull roar of tiio waves as heard in

some seaside cat e. We have passed a strong lino of trench ami wire, blown out of all semblance of a line by our own artillery. Wo have noted the strong square blockhouses ami “pill boxes” that sheltered the German machine guns and their gunners, and again we wonder at tiie feat of British arms _ that lias crowned this ridge with victory. WORK OF THE SNIPERS.

Presently wo are in tlie front line trench. It, too, is narrow and sandy and dry. A a yet it is not re-, vetted. ■ t times the enemy sends a _ lew shells to it across the waste of" No Man’s Land, and at night he mixes In’s shelling witbq poison gas. In the trench our snipers were constantly on the outlook. In their own language, they had got the ' Boche snipers down. With them boots swathed in sandbag wrappings, to keep their feet warm,’ they looked like Shackletona in the South Polar regions. Some others were sleeping in little dugouts in the comparatively dry sandy, soil, with their feet protruding into the trench through the sacking doorway. The Germans were quite close, and had been putting out wire in the night time on the edge of what had been a wood. Our men sometimes got a glimpse of them in parties of twos and threes, and then the rifles of the snipers rang; out. The divisiouaKgeueral with whom I made the trip* was busy all this time studying the situation. He likes to see for himself, tor that way success lies. In the course of the morning we obtained extended views far into the enemy’s terrain. On the horizon on the left front there roomed up a ridge that will not be easliy taken. We saw. Moorslede, undeatroyed, amidst its trees the broken buildings of Gheluvelt and its ridge; and, fronting it, Polderhoek Chateau, near which brave men of the New Zealand Division have fallen.