TRIBUTE TO FRENCH.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7717, 9 May 1916, Page 1

TRIBUTE TO FRENCH.

BY KAISER’S FIFTH SON. Prince Oscar, the fifth son of the Kaiser, has written a little book called “The Winter Battle,” in which he describes some of the fighting in the Champagne district. The Prince was an officer on the staff of the commanding general, and he gives a vivid description of his experiences. According to a translation which appears in the “New York American” he says: “It was, however, not the attacks of their infantry which made this battle so hideous for us, nor was it the hand-to-hand struggle in the trenches, man against man, where the German, possessing greater physical strength, was easily the match of the individual Frenchman. What made the battle a living hell was the Work of the French artillery, enormous in strength, with large supplies of ammunition, which was spent lavishly. Life in the trenches became a perpetual nightmare and stamped as unforgettable heroes the men who went through it without flinching. “On to a comparatively small area the French on one day throw a hund. red thousand shells. We found a French document in which the commanding officer calculated that eighteen bombs must be the allowance per metre of German trench, these eighteen bombs to be used, not in a day, but within one or two hours. The rapidity of the artillery fire was, therefore, as great as that of an ordinary machine-gun, but the shells hurled against us were not infantry shells, hut grenades of every calibre. ‘Drum-fire’ is the name for this sort of artillery fire, and its effects were simply dreadful —unspeakable. The barbed wire was completely annihilated, was clean wiped out of existence; the trenches were flattened into mounds, their foundations crumbling away. No known sort of earthworks were able to withstand such fire for even a short time.

“Wien such ‘drum-fire’ began a huge wall of smoke and chalk particles rose over onr trenches, cutting off the men from the rest of the world. The horror of the scene was augmented by the ceaseless rumbling, thundering, and crashing which filled the air, and which, even miles away, sounded like a heavy thunderstorm. It seemed impossible that any living 1 creature should survive such a hellish turmoil. "When the firing ceased abruptly, or when its direction was changed to give the French infantry a chance to attack us, then our brave fusiliers, musketeers, grenadiers, crawled out of the funnels and pockets into which the enemy’s grenades had ploughed the earth, made their way from among broken foundations, crumbling cement, trickling sand bags, and grabbing their guns and wiping the dirt from their eyes, they repulsed the French attack. “And this was done, not once, but dozens of times. “Occasionally our men were ordered to abandon a trench which was suffering particularly from ‘drumfire’ in order to avoid unnecessary loss of life, and the crew from such an abandoned trench was then placed in our second line of entrenchments. If sometimes happened that French infantrymen, under protection of their artillery fire, reached and took such an empty trench, succeeding the more readily because they encountered no obstacles. Our soldiers then sprang fortli from their cover and attacked the French with hand grenades and bayonets. “If for some reason or other this counter-attack was not made at once, but was postponed for an hour or two, we were not so sure of success, and it was then never secured by us without heavy casualties, for the few hours that had elapsed had amply sufficed the French, who were exceedingly clever at every sort of entrenchment, to change and remodel the trench for their purposes, to instal machine-guns, to place sand-bag barriers along both sides, and to make sundry other changes. This done the ‘Frenchman’s nest’ was complete.”