THE MESSINES RIDGE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12084, 13 August 1917, Page 8

THE MESSINES RIDGE.

HORRORS OF THE SALIENT.

HOW THE BRITISH HELD OR AND SUFFERED FOR TWO YEARS.

(By PHILIP GIBBS i WAR CORRESPONDENTS' HEADQUARTERS, Juno 12. " The enemy must not get the Messinos Rid go at any price." This sentence stands out as an absolute command in tho German order issued to their troops before the hattlo which thoy knew was coming. The words are peremptory, among promises of artillery support and immediate counter-attacks from divisions behind tho first line troops, which would be read now as a hollow mockery bv those men wbo are our prisoners, captured in crowds from their welter of mined and cratered earth. While half-way through tbe battle their artillery tried to drag their field guns back to something like safety in the wako of heavy guns, which oven beforo the battle had been withdrawn to the farthest possible range of action, though forward observing officers tried to conceal this from tho infantry by coming to their usual posts. Tho hattlo is over. Messincs Ridge, which was not to be ours at any price, is ours at a price which our Army thinks very cheap-—though" many brave men paid for it with their lives—and our outposts are pushng forward towards Warneton, far beyond the further slopes, after an enemy retiring upon that place. Only our men who have fought in the Ypres salient know the full meaning of that order. "Tho enemy must not get the Mes-sines Ridge at any price." IMPORTANCE OF THE RIDGE. The Messines Ridge was our curse, and tho loss of it to the enemy means a great relief to that curse by straightening out the salient south of Hooge, and robbing the ouemy of direct observation over our ground and forcing his guns furthor back.

. the " Daily Chronicle.") alive finite close to him and the nights and days under constant shell fire. But these little homesteads in or about the salient are few in their strange escape, and elsewhero there is not a building which stands unpierccd or in more, than a fragment of ruin. Young officers of ours lived within these ruins wondering whethe rit would he this day or next. now. as they spoke, or in the. silence that followed, some beastly shell would hurst through and tear down the Kirkchner prints which they had pinned to broken timbers, and" smash tho bits of mirror thev used for shaving glasses and lay them out in the wreckage. HORRORS OF THE SALIENT.

When he gees home on leave and sits at his own hearthside these dream pictures come buck to him with their old. horror, as to thousands of men who have fought in the salient, like those London boys L met one night, in Ypres, cooking cocoa under shell tire, like thoso King'cs Royal Riflemen I saw going up to a counter-attack after the first attack by fiammenwerfer, and tho padre who went up to tiio canal bank at night and found five dead men .n a U Cross hut and not a soul alive about) him, and tho Canadians who fought, through a storm of shells in Maple Copse. The horror of that salient in its old evil da\\s lives in its sinister place names:—Dead Horso Corner, and Dpad Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Pnc. Street, Dead Dog Farm, and tho Moated Grange, on the way to St Eloi, Stinking Farm, and Suicido Corner, and Shell Farm Barn. I passed by .some of these places and folt cold in remembrance of all the evil of them. Bovs of ours have been smashed in all these ill-fa mod spots. Every bit of ruin here, is the scene of foul tragedy to young life. To these places women will come to weep when tho war is done, and the stones will bo memorials of brave Hearts who came here in the darkness with ju-t » glance at- the lights in iho :,uy and a word of "Carry on. men,-' leiore lhcy fell. Roads are still sinister.

From Messines and Wytsehaeto ho had absolute observation of a great tract of country in which our mon lived and died—how complete sin observation I did not realise until after this battle, when standing in Wytsehaeto Wood and on the mound by St EloL and on the ground rising up to Messinos.

ENEMY'S' BLIND SHOOTING. Tho enemv can all shoot across the salient from the. north. There is no certain safety anywhere yet. But one thing has altered, and it makes a world of difference. The enemy has no longer direct observation of tho southern part of the salient, and by tho taking o Mossiness Kidgo he has lost a great part of power of his 'evil spell. The cnemv can shoot, and is still shooting into this side of the. salient, but ho is shooting blind, and his shells aro aimless, a.ud that is what makes all the difference between one's chances of life and death. It is tho reason why the, German Command issued tho order: ''The enemv must not got the Messineft Ridge, at anv price." As I have stud, tho tables aro turned, and what ho madn our men suffer when he, had the observation and the guns, his men will suffer now that we have the observation and the gunfire. He has suffered already terrible agonies and a. bloody slaughter, so that letters written by his men in their dugouts and captured by the sackful in this battle cry out to God for pity and for an end to all this misery. '"' We aro now in this hell. One might believe that God would not allow it to go on any longer like this. t think wo shall be relieved one of these davs. as there are not many left." '"The. English have completely smashed in the whole trench, and all the dugouts. I was almost buried in a. dug-out yesterday. It. was of concrete, and tho English 'put a. few 38 centimetre shells on it., when iti collapsed like a concertina.. A whole crowd of men wero buried and burnt. I cannot describe what it is like here. Soon there will be no hope for us. We have a, frightful lot of casualties; drumfire day and night, fourteen days of it already. So we can't compete with the English." " We. are five days in tho five days in support, live days in trench again, then wo go baok for ten days. Our division's losses aro over one hundred men each day. The enemy bombards the trench with aerial observation. The aviator flies quite low, as nobody dares to show himself." '• Wo have been in an advanced position for twenty days, and 1 can tell you it is regular hell here and one docs not knoAV what to do. Thero will soon T»o no way of escape for us. Tho English smash up everything with their artillery, and we have fearful losses." " We have; an artillery fire here such as you cannot imagine. Yesterday twentv-ono men were killed and seven wounded with one shot. Our artillcry does not speak." ''To-day (June 1) is now tho thirteenth day on which our trenches and the ground behind are exposed to heavy lire. All the trenches are .smashed in. No more shelter is to hand, as battery emplacements up to two metres' thickare completely destroyed, .mid even six-metre-dcep galleries are not safe from guns of heavy calibre. Thus we aro forced into the open without, any protection, and have, to submit to the. passage of a. hail of iron. Our losses, therefore, are very heavy, and each day we must thank God that we aro alive." AGONY ONLY BEGINNING.

I looked hack, and saw every dot-ail of our old territory laid out like a relief map ljrightly coloured. ''My God," said an officer by my side, " it's a wonder they allowed us to live at all." He had fought in tho old days in the salient, had lived like a hunted animal there, hiding in holes from the monstrous birds of prey screeching and roaring overhead in search of human flesh.

Before us now, looking as the Germans used to look, wo saw all this countryside, which is a field of honour, where our youth has fallen in great numbers, a great graveyard of gallant boyhood. The enemy could see every movement of our men, unless they moved underground, or under the cover of foliage on Kenimel Hill and its leafy lanes, or behind the camouflage screens which run along the roadways, or between tho gaps in the ruined villages.

TWO YEA US' BOMBARDMENT. Stnrtilingly clear were the rod roofs of Dickebusoh and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses, into which for two Soars and a. half the* enemy lias flung great, .shells, and the church tower of Ivemmel, where the graves axe opened by shell-tiro and old bones laid bare. The roads to Voorniczocls and Vierstraato. througli which 1 went yesterday, -are stfill under the old spell of horror at thoso obscene ruins of decent Flemish hamlets. Southward one, saw Xoiivo Fgliso, with its rap of n tower, and Plug Street Wood, where, bulieis .snapped between the branelve.s about Piccadilly Circus and down the Strand and .across 10 Somerset' House-, and whoro at Hyde Park Corner T lirst ho.ar.dt the voice of Percy, a high velocity fellow, who kills you with a quick InAinCe. Gorman eyes staring from "W.ytscliaote- and Messinos. making little marks on big maps, talking to their gunners over telephone, wires, and registering roads and cross-roads, field tracks, camps, billets, farmhouses tuckid into little croups of frees through which their red roofs gleamed, watehine through telescopes for small parlies of .British soldiers or single figures in a (lowered tapestry of fields between the winding hummocks of sandbag parapets, had all this ground of ours at the mercy of their guns, and that was not merciful. Day by day two years ago 1 used to see Dickebusch in clouds of smoke, and bated to go through the place. They shelled separate farmhouses and isolated barns until they became bits ol oddly standing brick about' great, holes. They shelled the roads down which our transports came at, night, and communication trenches up which our men moved to the front lines, and gun positions revealed by every flash, -and dugouts foolishly frail against their frightful fi.U's which in early days we could onlv answer with a few weak squeaks. Yet. by sonic* extraordinary freak, not certainlv by any kind of eharitiy, for that does not belong to war, there were places they failed to shell, though they were clearly visible —little- groups of Flemish cottages with flaming jed tiles, a big ohl house here or there wit/li pointed roofs rising above a screen c': poplar trees, fields still cultivated, as 1 saw them yesterday, by old Flemish women who bent over the, beetroots and hung out washing under Gorman eyes and German guns, and wont up and down with pjough-horsos close to o'ir gun positions, and sold bad beer to Fnglisk, soldiers glad of any kind of beer in places where, death was imminent .and where, as they drank, tho glass might be smashed out of their hand by a fivnur Key tho or a yard of wall. " YVhv do you stay here:''' [ an old woman i» Plug Street village uv year and a bait" ago. Four children played about, her. though at tho time shells vrcr,} whining overhead and crashing but) half a field away. "H is m.Y home," she said, and tluMght that a. good enoujdi answer. "How about the children?" I asked, and she said, "It's their homo, and we cam a littlo money." MENACE OF DEATH. Even when this Inst battle began those peasants still remained encircled by our batteries and wiLb, German crumps falling about their fields ;hlcateyed old men gazed up to the sky, watched the flame-bursts of the mines, then turned- to their earth again; and the battle itself was heralded at dawn by the crowing of cocks in littlo farmsteads somewhere down by Kemniel. Chanteclor sounded th 0 battle charge with his clarion noto, as in old dawns when English and French knights were drawn in line of battle. An officer who was with me in Wytschaeto Wood, looked down atl these old places where ho had lived in the menaoe of doath, and remembered his escapes; that time when the back of his due-out was hit by a huge shell as be sat in his pyjamas, smoking a cigarette; and that otter time when his servant waa buried

This is only the beginning of the agony of the. (ierman soldier. Our gun- ■ power, great as it, is now, is in;-reusing-in strength. Holding the Messincs Ridge wo have observation over the ground to which ho has been forced back, and any -movement of his troops is reported by forward observing officers to our batteries. There- is hardly a man in our Army who does not pity, in spite of all tho hate of war, these young Germans who aro forced against their will, for they are all sick of tho strife, to enduro this prolonged slaughter which will not bo spared then unless the scales fall from the eyes of their people, or unless tin derman armv itself revolts from unnecessary sacrifice and takes vengeance on thoso who liavo ordered it. That may happen, though it is unlikely, JUKI so those frightful hammerstrokes of ours will ho repeated, ;nid other tieldf. will be strewn with the. dead, and the stench of death will bo rising, as it now rises, »:i great .stretches of upheave?! earth, in whieli German hopes and German boys lio buried together.