THE GERMAN LINES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 195, 26 January 1915, Page 6

THE GERMAN LINES.

AN AMERICAN'S IMPRESSIONS. PLENTY OF IRON CROSSES. The first newspaper representative of any nationality to be. wounded in the present campaign, Mr. Donald Thompson, a staff photographer of the New York World, has returned to London from Belgium, where he spent two Weeks at the front with the German Army. His wounds, which kept him in German base hospital for three days, were the result of a shell from a British warship, which dropped through the roof of a house in which Mr. Thompson was dining with some German officers. Three of the six officers were killed by the same explosion, and several others were wounded. A complete narrative of Mr Thompson's adventures, given below, as he told it, throws an .interesting light on the German movements during the battle of the road to Calais.

"On arriving at Antwerp," he said, I immediately heard that fighting on the coast was getting very brisk. Travelling by way of St. Nicholas, I reached Bruges" at five in the morning. During my brief stay there I saw several flat railway cars loaded with big objects covered with tarpaulin, which closely resembled submarines or parts of submarines They were very closely guards ed, and nobody would answer questions about them, except one officer, who informed me in a whisper that it had been necessary to tear several bridges down ,to get them past. He would not however, say ' whether they were submarines "During most of my first day on this 'front—Wednesday, October 21—the Germans kept up the iwst terriffic fire on Dixmunde Very few British prisoners were brought in, but I saw several Belgians. Orders had been given, lam told, to level every house *n Dixmunde, and from a church steeple in the village .just back of the artillery trenches you could see a continuous flash of bursting shells in the town—about 50 shells a minute.

I accompanied an officer on horseback to the trenches back of Nieuport. An infantry private showed hesitation in obeying his captain's command to advance into the firing zone, and the whole company immediately became partly demoralised. The captain promptly drew bis revolver and shot the private dead, after which the otb*r soldiers obeyed bis orders very quickly indeed. "The trenches at this point were among the sand dunes. For the first time I saw an incredible slaughter at close range. I dug myself a little hole at one end of an infantry trench and .aat there listening to the roar of shrapnel and watclimg men being killed by the score a few feet from me. Under continuous fire from the British warships we fell back across the dunes until we reached the village which was the base. I remained there all the next day and that night, and while I was dining with a dozen officers, a British j shell dropped in on us through the roof. I remembered nothing more until I found myself rocking in an ambulance on the way to Bruges i fThey told me that everybody in the house had been killed or wounded. Two lof the officers with me at the table were killed instantly, and' the third died in hospital The German Red Cross people dressed my wounds, which were not- as serious as they seemed at first, and after a couple of days more I was ,able to return to Antwerp aboard an ammunition cart. After a little rest there I came on to London, having had enough of fighting for a while anyway. "The two features of the German Army that impressed me most, I think, were the number of desertions from the ranks, and the number of iron crosses handed out. A suit of clothes was stolen from nit by a soldier, who put it on to get across the Dutch frontier, and 1 know that hundreds, if not thousands, of others are doing the same thing. The' German watch on the. frontier is redoubled, and the do«erti,ons seem to increase steadily. Noticing that almost 'every German officer and many privates as well were wearing an Iron Cross, I asked one officer if the Kaiser was giving them away with packets of cigarettes. He seemed surprised, so I asked how many cigarette coupons it was necessary to save to get the Iron Cross. He got quite sore at that.