WITH THE FRENCH ARMY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11670, 10 April 1916, Page 2

WITH THE FRENCH ARMY.

OUR FALS TRADITIONS. GREAT .-DEFENSIVE FIGHTERS. (From H. S. GULLETT, Official Australian Correspondent with tho French Army.) I PARIS. ' Tho French Army is as impressive to an Englishman as tho British Navy is to a Frenchman. The French excel on the land! a» wo do on the water. The accidental defeat of 1870, when there wavS a temporary failure of French leadership, has been foolishly accepted as tho failure of the French soldier, and as marking the deterioration of tho whole people. Capably led, as ho has been in this war, the French soldier to-day has no superior in the world, and, measured in millions, no equal. The array as you see it is a marvel of strength and efficiency. This war is tho destroyer of cheap and false traditions, and among others that must bo abandoned, is tho tradition that tho French wero not defensive fighters The truth is that their offensive qualities are so magnificent that wo havo been wont to deny tlaem any defensive merits at all. The Frenchman has been rather proud of the charge; ho bo lores the assault, and excels at it, that ho has been somewhat contemptuous about tho great negative qualities of war. In England last year it was generally thought that the French might soon £row tired of the struggle, because of the necessity for so much sitting still, and the absence of opportunity for sustained and profitable aggression. Our ignorance of tho fighting legions of the Republic wavS almost tragic..

WHAT THE FRENCH HAVE DONE. ' Think what the French have done! ■ As you move among these gallant troops you blush for your old doubts and fears about the people and the soldiers : of Franco, and your mind is carriei 1 back to the most glorious' pages of the 1 nation's military history. Almost 1 single-handed she stopped tho German hosts, and stopped them without trenches, fighting strategy against strategy and man against, man—or one man to two—in the open as in the battles of tho past. Then their sons manned' 500 milos of trenches, as against some 25 or 30 miles held nt that time by the British, and, fighting on the defensive, resisted every effort of the German, hosts, to break through. It was tho popular belief in England in those days tnat the, Germans had a special desire to break through the British line and annihilate our " despicable little army." But common-sense tells us that the-concern of the Germans was to break tho western front at its weakest point. Had there been airy weak spot in the long French front, it was there that the enemy would have concentrated his attack, and' we know that he did attack the French a.t fifty different places. It cannot be too often repeated that bad the Germans defeated the French in their first great onrush, and put the Republic out of action, the war must have been practically over. England might have kept up the' blockade for twe*hty years, but she could never have hoped to conquer the Germans/on land. The downfall of Franco would have been inevitably followed by the smashing of the Russian arms. You roalise on this long battlefield that the menace of successful_ militarism was never as serious as) it is to-day. Had Germany conquered France and Russia, she could have po- . liced those countries with a few thousand troops. All she had to do was to ensure that they could not manufacture machine guns, and artillery and munitions, and they were powerless. The truth is, if we are in the least generous, that • we must admit that France practically saved' herself and at the same timo saved Europe. Her debt to the British Navy is very great, much greater than to tho little Expeditionary Force. It we recall that Germany invaded the Republic with two and a haif millions of men, and that the British Expeditionary Force did not reach 100,000, we are compelled , to give Franco her due. A strong France is almost as important for England's safety against Germany as a strong Navy. SOLID METHODICAL QUALITIES. The French on the defensive have proved themselves possessed to a surr prising degree of those solid methodical qualities which wo liked to believe were the popular attribute of the British. The thoroughness of" the French defences are positivelv depressing. You find it hard to believe that an army which looked for an advance within the near future would have expended so much design and hard labour and money upon the line of trenches which it at present occupies. On the British front you get the idea that we have been perhaps a little too optimistic; that we had hopod each week would be our last on the ground now occupied, and that soon we should be occupying positions further east: In. the French lines'you aro almost led to think that the people of the Republic are reconciled to a new and fixed frontier. Their trendies have not only a sense of complete security so ..far as the German offensive is concerned, but also an atmosphere of homely comfort. One mind seems to have designed and executed the whole system just as one exalted impulse dictates the supreme | sacrifice, if need be, for its defence. When you observe tho thoroughness and duplication of the French defences, there is borne in upon you a deeper conception of what we " have to overcome on the German side before wo reach that victory towards which we are striving, and which on this front at least wo are surely attaining. Because we know from the German trenches already captured by the Allies that the enemy too excel at the defensive, although such a confession means the. overturning of- much popular misconception in England at the commencement of the war, when it was believed that the German machine would foil if it could not constantly go forward. But in the French and German lines to-day there is this difference—the French have during the war enormously increased their man power, while their artillery and machine guns are multiplied from month to month and their munitionment is now ample for every need: tho Germans, as we have the best of reasons for believing, are diminishing every day in man power and no longer increase a-s they did in guns and munitionment. Already the advantage is with the French and the British, and increasingly so; in the course of'time this advantage will become sufficiently overwhelming to make progress practicable, and then war will be over. The ' French laugh if you tell them that their lines have an atmosphere of permanence. Thoy are as confident of travelling east as the British,, but they are perhaps a little morn careful of the lives of their soldiers than we are—a little less sporting when it comes to vital things—and so they have oxcelled with engineering and nawying just as they have with their .artillery and infantry. EXTRAORDINARY DUPLICATION. At one part of the liYench lines we visited, a general told us that the total length of trenches, including reserve trenches and communications, on a front of seventeen kilometres made up no less than 400 kilometres. The actual front lino was multiplied twentythreo timtsl All of this trenching would be of usual depth; in addition thoro would be numberless great dugouts, or rather caves, and machine gua emplacements, perhaps a few redoubts and scores of fortified houses and posts. A single French redoubt would before the war-'have brought curious

travellers from all over the- world to marvel at the resourcefulness displayed in its creation; at its apparent maze and yot its perfect system. We'went down many steps far into the darkness, with boarded floor and 1 timbered sides and ceiling, passed along a gallery for perhaps fifty yards, and then ascended into tho open" of .a lifctlo square village ohurohyard* surrounded by an old stone .wall some three feet thick and eight feet high. We wero well behind the front line, but here with it* galleries and walls and trenches and its Communication with tho shattered village alongside a- force might have survived i for days, possibly wen. weeks, after] the front trenches had been carried. Thousands of troops might stream past on either side of the redoubt, but so long as it stands and can work a few machine guns, the doom of the enemy is certain. These islands have a hundred times stood unmoved amidst the wild flood of the invaders, and by their cross-fi.ro have first arrested and then . reduced the enemy battalions to chaos. Their strength being underground they' are proof against days of shelling by the heaviest of artillery, and when | they aro reduced it is by hand to hand j fighting of the most • terrible and bloodiest nature which takes place with bomb and bayonet and fist and fingers and teeth in dark underground passages. The one of which I write was a typical French countryside cemetery in war time. Here and there a shell had violently uprooted the resting places of generations of villagers,- new crosses stood above soldiers' graves which, although within a few hundred yards of the enemy lines, were fragrant with fresh flowers. I noticed the grave of a young German airman and remarked to an officer that it bore its cross and was carefully tended. " There is still somo chivalry left," I suggested. "Yes," he replied, nob without bitterness, "but only between the flying men. The German aviators appear to have escaped kultur. We care for their dead, and we know they do for ours." It-is well that this should,be so, for when the heroic airman falls, dead or wounded, ho falls nearly always among his foes. A SINISTER PINE FOREST.

We climbed a steep hill densely covered with a pine forest extending over thousands.of acres. Our mission was a visit to formidable batteries of heavy guns, and as wo followed: a winding unmade footpath through the pines wo wondered' how the great guns were ever got into position. There were numbers of monster guns, and tha hill was occupied by hundreds of men, but so skilful was the concealment that you might havo passed over it many times and seen nothing more than an occasional poldier. Ai, a shout from the omesr eager artillerymen leapt liko goblins from holes about the roots of the gloomy pines and sported maliciously round the guns. Touches from deft fingers, and evil muzzles raised themselves slowly hut surely, for the top of th© hill was between them and the enemy. "Words of command rang out strangely in the stillness of the peaceful forest; a thunderous crash; a pause for a minute as it seemed, and then cam© the dull boom of the shell as it burst males away in the country of the enemy. The officer spoke again:; the mon went back to their caves, and silence fell among the pi ne3. So operates tho decisive machinery in the war.

AN OBSERVATION POST. , As we climbed up towards an observation post vro passed' a jagged hole in the-tuff which suggested that, some huge hellish, iron hand bad reached down and olutohed earth and rock and roots at random. Our guide smiled. M So far," he said", "they have not succeeded in finding us. although thoy are always shooting." "Wo had glimpses of telephone wires and wireless installations and boxes of keen carrier pigeons. The telephones are sufficient communication between the observers and their batteries upon peaceful days like this, but should an attack come" with its hurricane of shell? destroying even the underground telephones and wireless stations, the pigeons might mean the saving or the carrying of: a position. Should the pigeons be destroyed there are still the old-fashioned signallers and runners, and after them detailed pre-ar-ranged time-tables. And yet despite all this we know that in nearly every serious attack on trenches in the war, artillery and infantry have sooner or later lost their connection. That is the commonest cause of chaos and failure.

DIRECTING THE GUNS

Our hill ends in a sheer drop of some hundreds of feet down to a wide flooded river valley, in which are the opposing trenches. AVe peer down the chalky network showing white against the dark wet surface soil, and it is apparently so hopeless in design and rude in execution that it might have been, the achievement of two races of drunken supermen fiercely working in the darkness. (An aerial photograph of trenches looks like the result of some competitive blindfold drawing game at a children's party.) We observe from the shelter of trees and barriers of branches renewed from night to night to ensure that the enemy shall not get the information from fading leaves. Then a, hundred yards to the rear in a dense part of the forest we proceed to see the invariable alternative. We dip into a, hollow in the ground and pass along a dry timbered passage in which we can comfortably, ij'alk erect, and descend sharply. - Soon each member of the party is standing in a little cave to himself, far down the side of the bluff, and looking through . narrow horizontal slits at leisure and in safetv over the field of conflict. From there the military observers can seo with precision the bursting of every shell flung from the great blind guns behind the hill.