FIGHTING IN THE MUD.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 February 1916, Page 6

FIGHTING IN THE MUD.

WESTERN FRONT CONDITIONS. HARDSHIPS OF THE ENEMY. GREAT WORK OF ALLIES' GUNS. "GERMANS HARD TO BREAK." A vivid picture of the present unpleasant conditions at the British front in the West is supplied by Mr. Philip Gibbs, who writes:— It is difficult to imagine more dreary and dreadful weather than this in Flanders, where our soldiers have settled down now—knee-deep where the trenches are' worst—into the winter campaign. When the wind drops at dusk or dawn a whitisli fog creeps out of the dark ground, so that rifles are clammy to the touch and a horrible coverlet of moisture settles upon every stick of furniture in the dug-outs, and nothing can be seen through the veil of vapor to the enemy's lines, where he stays invisible, and inactive, as far as any attack is concerned. He is not likely to attack so long as the battlefields are in the quagmire state. A bayonet charge would be c?oggcd in the mud after the first jump overthe parapet, and to advance artillery, would be a sheer impossibility. For some time it will be a stick-in-the-mud warfare, and not restful because of that. There is incessant work to do in the trenches, draining them, strengthening the parapets, riveting their walls, tiling or boarding their floorways, timbering the dug-outs, and the working parties have a very "thin" time, as they call it, in spite of waders over their boots and steel helmets here and there—not nearly enough yet—to keep off the shrapnel bullets which get mixed up with the rain-drops, and account for a large proportion of the casualties which build up the weekly averages of wounded in the casualty clearing-stati6n. Our men are having an uncomfortable time in grinning and bearing it in the same old way, which is wonderful; but the great bulk from Germany on the other side of the barbed wire are much more miserable.-

DISPIRITED ENEMY ; This is not an amiable fiction to cheer thfi folks at home. It is a. grim and sober truth, which is having a demoralising effect upon the enemy's spirits. That he is fearfully downcast is proved in a minor way by the increasing number of men who crawl over to our lines and give themselves up, and who tell the most pitiful storie3 of the misery of their lives. It is not only that many of their trenches are wetter than ours, but that the physique of the German soldier does not seem so well able as ours to stand the hideous discomfort of them. One hears a good deal about the elaborate comfort of the German dug-outs—-,their electric fittings, their cottage pianos, their panelled walls—and I have seen some of them myself in captured positions; but, after all. they are safe places, "for officers only," and a trench is a trench wherever it is, especially when there is 3ft of water in it. There were great rivers in the German trenches to the north of Hooge (whee at last we hold the higher ground), so that the enemy has gone to enormous trouble to drain the Bellewande Lake, which oozed into them. The trenches are drier now, but the ground in the neighbourhood is a morass, in which the German soldiers flounder, getting it "in the neck," in the literal and figurative sense of that expression. THE HORROR OF THE GUNS. But this terrible dampness is not the only cause of the Germans' low spirits opposite our lines. Our artillery is making life a horror to them. The days have gone by since this time, a year ago, when we had to suffer their shell-fire in something like silence, sending back a poor retort in whizz-bangs to the daily frightfulness of their high explosives. The position is partly reversed. Month after month, thanks to the toil of our men at home, nev guns have come out to us, and new stores of ammunition. I have seen them crawling along the roads—six inches and nine-point-twos, Aunt Marias and grandmothers—drawn by caterpillar traction-engines, moving along to convenient fields, in which to pitch their camps, with holes in the ground for rows, as neat as ninepins, of concentrated death. They are still coming alona, those steel tubes and high-ex-plosive shells. Not even the mud stops those caterpillar wheels, whose broad bands make moving platforms over the ruts and rain pools. And the guns are not idle, whatever the weather is. Every day now there is a bombardment of the enemy's lines. For hours there is the rumble and roar of it, so that the life of the German soldiers in the trenches, and behind, must be of a most hellish kind, It is impossible to know how much it costs them in actual casualties. One is apt to over-estimate the result of even a great expenditure of shells. But merely as a nerve-shatter-ing agent its effect is paralysing when continued day after d».y, as we are now doing.

REDOUBT DESTROYED. But it is more than that. On one section of the line, near St. Yves, in the Massines area, we have just destroyed | an important and strongly-fortified position, known as the High Command Redoubt, flinging masses of masonry to the four winds and smashing up the machinegun emplacements. In this part of the line also we made a chaos of 30yds of German trenches, blowing the parapets to pieces and exposing their dug-outs and two farms behind the earthworks, which can now be swept with machine-gun fire. In other sections we have been busy knocking down parapets, and at nigllt, when the working parties try to repair the damage, they also- poor wretches, come under the flail of our machine-guns. It is not a matter for wonderment that the German soldiers who come to us as prisoners should cry out against their fate, and bemoan the awful horror of the war. And yet it should not lead lis to false optimism, nor even to the cheerful thought of Mr. Redmond that ''we have the Germans beaten" on the Western front. The German artillery is still there, and, although we have increased our own, those guns of theirs have not lost the power of their destruetiveness. Nor i 3 the enemy idle while we work. Every day and every week he is strengthening Iris lines, so that if his man-power grows weaker he can still hold firm by mansaving machinery and defences. We should be foolish if we under-rated his formidable strength, and whenever our next offensive may oome the enemy will still be hard to "break. Before he is broken it will need enormous effort in every fibre of our national strength, and a great price in blood and treasure must still be paid for victory. That is t|« pj«ffl torth, which »t m m& & to