"OVER THE TOP."

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 960, 9 March 1917, Page 6

"OVER THE TOP."

FANTASTIC FROLICS. CAPERS OF BROTHER TANK. Last New Year's Eve (writes Philip Gibbs in Ihc "Daily Chronicle'') —Ihc end of a year which had been full of menace for our fighting men, because at the beginning our lines had no great power of guns behind them, and full of hopes that had been unfilled, in spite of all their courage ami all their sacrilice—an artillery officer up in the Ypres salient waited for the tick of midnight by his wrist watch (it gave a glow-worm light in the darkness), and then shouted the word "Fire!" One gun spoke, and then for a few seconds there was silence. Over in the German line the flares went up and down, and it was very quiet in the enemy trenches, where, perhaps, the sentries wondered at that solitary gun. Then the artillery officer gave the word of command again. This time the battery fired nine rounds. A little while there was silence again, followed by another solitary shot, and then by six rounds. So did the artillery in the Ypres salient salute the birth of the New Year, born in war, coming to our soldiers and our race with many days of battle, with new and stern demands for the lives and blood of men, but also with great promises of victory. To-nighf it is another New Year's Eve, and the year is coming to us with the same demands and the same promises, and the only difference between our hopes upon this night ami that of a year ago is that by the struggle and endeavour of those past 12 months the ending is nearer in sight and the promise very near—very near as we hope and believe—its fulfilment.

The guns will speak again to-night, saluting by the same kind of sullen salvo the first day of the last year of war. The last year, if we have luck. It is raining now, a soft rain swept gustily across the fields by a Wind so mild after all our wild weather that it seems to have the breath of spring in it. A Peace Mirage.

For a little while yesterday this mildness, and the sunlight lying over the battlefields, and a strange, rare inactivity of artillery, gave one just for one second of a day-dream a sense that Peace had already come and that the victory had been won. It was queer. I stood looking upon Neuville St. Vaast and the Vimy Ridge. Our trenches and the enemy's wound along the slopes in wavy lines of white chalk. There to my right was the Labyrinth and in a hollow the ruins of Souchez. When I had first come to these battlefields they were strewn with dead—French dead—after fighting frightful and ferocious in intensity. Uncxploded shells lay everywhere, and the litter of great ruin, and storms of shells were bursting upon the Vimy Ridge.

The last time I went to these battlefields the high ridge of Vimy was still aflame, and British troops were attacking the mine-craters there. Yesterday all the scene was quiet, and briglvt sunlight gleamed upon the broken roofs of Neuville, and the white trenches seemed abandoned. The wet earth and leaves about me in a ruined farmyard had the moist scent of early spring. A man was wandering up a road where six months ago he would have been killed before he had gone a hundred yards. Lord! It looked like peace again! ... It was only a false mirage. There was no peace. Presently a battery began to fire. I saw the shells bursting over the enemy's position. Now and again there was the sullen crump of a German "heavy," and though the trenches seemed deserted on either side they were held as usual by men waiting and watching with machine guns and hand grenades and trenchmortars. There is no peace. New Year "Over the Top."

To-night those men of ours are at their posts. The soft rain beats down upon their steel helmets. As they move about the trenches their boots squelch in the deep, soft mud. Before midnight some of the oflicers will come and look across the parapets "to see the New Year go over the top," as a friend of mine puts it.

The sentimentalist in the heart of the British soldier v will cause many a man to-night to look back upon the past 12 months with strange stirrings of remembrance—how many good fellows have "gone West" since this night a year ago!—and look forward to the New Year with an enormous query in his soul. Behind the lines—so close thai the noise of the guns shakes the windows of French villages and the light of the night rockets makes the sky pale above them—bell-ringers are going round the little old churches to ring the New Year in. In these little old churches the bells have been rung for many birthdays of the years and the centuries, when Edward the Black Prince came riding through them with Sir Walter Manny and Lord Chandos and other English knights, when Joan the Maid came in her armour with spirit voices calling through the wind, and when the guillotine was put up at midnight in the market square of Arras, and now the bells of France are clashing out again, and the wind mingles their notes with the booming of the guns, and another year of history opens with greater strife than in all the centuries before, and in these villages of France British soldiers stand on sentry duty saying, "Halt, who goes there?" to any shadow who comes out of the darkness. II is I he New Year that answers the challenge. "Friend!" "Advance, friend, to be recognised." But no man can yet say with what face this New Year of war will come. Our soldiers are not afraid to look it irt the face. I can

say this with truth, thai they arc glad to git rid of the old year, and greet the new one with an enormous uplifting of hearts and tremendous hope. There will he no tears tonight because 191G is dead and done with. Old Friends. This afternoon il was laughter I heard, and I spent some part of my New Year's Eve with those remarkable lighting machines of the British Army which caused men to laugh, and put them in high spirits, on a great day of battle, so that they went over the top with less apprehension of the great ordeal, and followed the friendly lead with strange gaiety into Tiers, into (Juedecourt, into Martinpuich, where death was busy. I renewed my acquaintance with the tanks.

They were in a frolicsome mood this afternoon, doing their amazing tricks as though in sheer lightheadedness of spirit, like elderly elephants who have heard the call of spring. These great monsters were sporting in fields pitted with shellcraters and criss-crossed by trenches. The ground beneath them was just a quagmire of mud and slime.

1 went into it ankle deep, anil hardly believed that Brother Tank could move in it because of bis enormous weight. But he did more than move in it. He came in his curious, stealthy way nosing forward as on his lirst appearance that 15th of September, hesitated a moment in front of a deep crater, then went down into it, sweeping the moist earth from his flanks, and crawled up on the other side, and made off very steadily to some trenches, smashing through their parapets and straddling across in splendid style. Other tanks came out from their lairs, bore down through quick-set hedges, and climbed up steep banks and manoeuvred for position like land dreadnoughts. Over Sandbag Breastwork.

But the greatest achievement—at least the most spectacular thing—done by one of these Things was when it climbed over a high breastwork of sandbags. It was a most fearsome and fantastic sight, and made me grow cold with a sudden sense of terror as though I were a German suddenly confronted by this monstrous apparition. It approached the breastwork slowly, halted a moment, and then began to climb up. Its huge form lifted itself higher and higher, bearing forward and over the obstacle as though the body of the beast were craning forward like a sea-elephant challenging a rival. Then suddenly it plunged down on the other side, with a sudden swing and clang of its gunturrets.

These tanks taking exercise were a comic sight, as a ludicrous nightmare from which one wakes laughing. But behind them is a sense of the horrible, because of their power as machines of death. It is only by deliberate intention that one can realise the human direction of them, and visualise those crews inside whose skill and courage and .great endurance give them their life and purpose, as powerful aids to an infantry attack. These men coming out of the monsters, keen fellows of the airman type, belong to the promise of the New Year.

They belong to the great company of that Youth which I met every day upon the roads of war, the Youth of all our race, in steel hats, in woolly coats, bearing their heavy packs lightly, and all the burden of this war, and looking forward to the future with the spirit of youth, hopeful, confident, ardent, undismayed by remembrance of past perils. They knew to-night by wireless the answer of the Allies to the German offer of peace. The New Year is to be a year of war. But they, believe that it is the last year of war, and it is that which makes it welcome.