ANZACS AT THE FRONT

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11764, 31 July 1916, Page 4

ANZACS AT THE FRONT

INTO A BATTERED TOWN.

A DAY IN THE FIRING UNE.

(From MALCOLM ROSS, Official War Correspondent with the Now Zealand Forces.)

NORTHERN FRANCE, June 4

In a preceding article I told how the New Zealand Brigades marched out to the front. At the end of the first day they cams to a town where there was comparative quiet, though the boom of the distant gun could be clearly heard. For a little while they rested there in billets, rather crowded. In such towns the men can wander about the streets and buy almost anything in the nhops, and in the estaminets they can get tho wine of the country, and mild beer that will not do anyone harm. There are also kinenns and concert halln. At the prpsent time an excellent London Concert Company is touring the district. In one of tho large tents of the Y.M.C.A., who, by the way, are doing excellent work hero as in Egypt and at the Dardanelles, a resting battalion of British Tommies congregated in force the other afternoon, and the pianist, an excellent tenor, a violinist and the comic man were heartily applauded. To men coming out of the trenches such an entertainment is a great treat. THE PADRE AND THE KINEMA.

One Sunday I wandered into one of the kinema halls in a town that had just escaped the German onrush. It had a little stage, with scenery painted by the Tommies themselves. Besides the operator's stall there was even a box for officers. True, it was not regal in its furnishings, but it filled the bill. The seats on the sawdusted floor were provision boxos. The stage was occupied by an Anzac padre, one who was much under shot and shell in tho Gallipoli trenches. The hall was filled with officers and soldiers gravely listening to his sermon. Flaring posters of the kine.ua shows decked the walls—"Harry Day presents 'Kiss me, Sergeant/ ' To-night's the Night,' " and similar themes. The padre himself must have been struck with the incongruity of his surroundings, though they did not detract one iota from the corcibleness of his sermon. He would no doubt be the first to recognise that the kinema as well as the sermon has a place behind the lines in these times. And I myself have a distinct recollection of a young padre hastening away from a good meal in an officers' mess to arrange one of these kinema shows for our men. In this particular hall of which I am, writing there have been Saturday evening concerts and boxing matches as well as moving pictures, and quite recently a number of Maoris delighted tho Tommies and astonished the natives with a vigorous presentation of one of their old war dances. KNIGHTS ON WHEELS.

As the New Zealanders marched out to the front they were able to obtain some idea of the extent to which mechanical transport is used in modern warfare. Great motor lorries were drawn up in a long' column by the roadside, or rumbled past with ammunition and provisions and a hundred and one other things. Motor-cars, motor ambulances, motor-cycles, and the ordinary bicycle also moved to and fro along the treelined roads. When you see a motor lorry numbered 27696 you are inclinr ed to rub your eyes and look again. But there is no doubt about it. In thus war petrol counts, and the consumption must be enormous. A whole army has been shifted to t a threatened flank and the situation saved by the taxi-cabs of a city. True there are horse teams also on these roads. At Gallipoli we had to manhandle our guns and even our shells, but here you find the horse still harnessed to the field gun and of moderate calibre, though one day quito recently I saw some huge things swathed in tarpaulins being drawn across our front by extraordinary engines with caterpillar wheels, that made one conjure up visions of antediluvian animals that lived when the denizens of this world fought wi+h tusks and teeth. Occasionally you do see an officer or a man astride a horse. But the man in a hurry takes a motorcar. Your modern knight is a knight on wheels—that is when ho is not a knight with wings. Day and night this mechanical transport goes snorting and rumbling by, the heavy laden lorries shaking the very earth, making the windows rattle, and waking you in your sleep. THE BATTERED TOWN.

After a brief spell in the first town they cam© to the Hew Zealanders marched on to another nearer the firing line. It was on© of tho towns that are quito within the reach of the German gunners, and when one took one's walks abroad or went to buy tobacco or to get shaved there was always the possibility that that would be tho last tobacco you would buy or the last shave you would get. From this place the New Zealanders went into tho trenches. I went with a Staff officer through the town for a little distance in a car. . At the end of a street on which the grass was growing we left- tho car, and commenced a hot and tiresome walk- Tho street up which wo went had been shelled again. The guns were firing as we went. Save for an officer and a few men not a solitary soul walked that street. A glance into the shops and the houses revealed only deplorable ruin. Some of the scenes were pathetic. In one house a perambulator half buried in the huddle of bricks and mortar, and a cup half full of tea on a tablo indicated a precipitate flight from the German shells. One wondered what had happened to the( baby. Was it still alive, or was it alive and an orphan? Almost every house and every 6hop in that street had been hit. There were some buildings that were in absolute ruin. Others were holed, but still habitable. _ Tiled roofs were torn and rent, as if they had been made of paper. Gaps of varied dimensions were there to let in tho rain or the sunshine. The dust left from falling brick and mortar lay thick on table, chair and bedstead, sanco the day the peoi>lo

fled. A rat ran through the ruin, prowling for provender-

IN THE TRENCHES.

It was a relief to turn from such a scene, and, entering a communication trench, make direct for the firing line. The trench was rather shallow. In places one did not feel too secure in it. It was floored with the now familiar battens of the "duck walk," and though the trenches were rapidly drying under tho influence of a lengthy spell of summer sunshine, there were places where the duck boards squished into the murky water. In this flat, wet land the trenches are not trenches in tho ordinary sense of the word. They consist mainly of a zig-zag sandbagged wall; though, to be strictly .accurate, it is good French soil that fills the bags, and that, as everyone knows, is not so satisfactory for the purpose as sand. In these days of armourpiercing bullets a man may bo nit by rifle fire through 3ft of earth-filled sacks. Behind the trenches the flat land, torn with shells, goes straight back. Water gathers in great holes, {stagnant and dirty. In some localities pumps are at work. These trenches, with their weathered sandbags, have a dmgy and forlorn apoearance. The only bright spots in them were the faces of their occupants- , The line was capable of improvement, ai.d several Now •aealanders were already busy with that work. Others, periscope in hand and rille ready, were watching out for any Hun who m an unguarded moment might show his crown above the parapet. But there were many men iu the trenches who up to this time bad never seen a German. A few had been shot by our snrpers. One man was .seen to ,jump up and fall like a shot T £ i 1 Som ® of our men had been •?i I? 0 ", * ou ca nnot have a war w m? j e losses all on on ® side. lbs dug-outs were comfortable, with wooden floors m them, and men were putting double blankets on the doors, the outer blanket soaked in some onemical as a protection against tho most devilish of all the Hunnish inventions, asphyxiating gas. The men seemed happy to be in the firing line. 1 bey had no complaints about the food, they wore more than a match for the German snipers. The German sniper is a good shot, but he has not the quickness of the colonial. On the way we passed a bit of trench that had been blown to bits a few weeks before our men " took over " from an English battalion. The ground for. some distance back of the trenches was pitted with the cannonade. The raw earth lay agape at the sky. Some ■of the shell holes were half full of slimy water. In the older pock marks the healing hand of nature was already clothing their circumference with grass and weeds and wild flowers. Obviously no man could have gone through that curtain of fire uninjured. But the Germans did not get that trench, and are still in their own line. In the front lino there were more recent evidences of destruction. That very morning the enemy had put fortythree shells into one small section of our trench. ' Strangely enough not a man was injured. We were already repairing the damage. But in t T .e daylight it was dangerous to walk past that bit of torn • trench. Later we had our revenge for that "bit* of work, as I shall show in another article.