NO ADVANCE.

Timaru Herald, Volume CVI, Issue 16310, 11 August 1917, Page 7

NO ADVANCE.

FOR A YEAR'S FIGHTING. To fight unceasingly for a period of over 12 mouths; to spend day after day under almost continuous shell fire, and then, at the end of the period, to bo in exactly the same trench as the ono you started in, was how MajorGeneral J. G. Legge, C.M.G., G. 8., Inspector-General of Military Camps in Australia., summed up one phase of modern warfare in the course of a lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Newman Society at Melbourne Univrsity. Such an experience, lie said, had actually befallen the men of the Australian division on the Somme, who, at the end of 13 months' service ptill occupied the same line of trenches which they took over originally. The intervening period had, however, been crammed with incident. J5a 0 h day provided its own particular excitement and perils —the raids across No Man's Land, the hunts for "specimens" in the shape of German prisoners, and nights spent under the highest strain, anticipating and in readiness for an enemy attack. The raids, stated General Legge, were probably eninyed more than anything else by the Australian soldiers at the front. They looked upon them as a sort of joke, and there was alwnvg groat hilarity as Cliev dressed for the occasion, and blackened their faces, to make themselves loss d'=tJnsnv'"e''n.hli} in the dark. Revolvers and Icnobkerries were the favourite weapons of the men on these occasions.