"THROUGH HELL”

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7720, 16 May 1916, Page 4

"THROUGH HELL”

HUNS USE PETROL SPRAY. FIENDISHNESS OF THEIR WAR METHODS. That a man rushing out to stop a fast railway train with a walking stick is no more powerless than the infantryman who has to charge in the face of the machine-gun is the conclusion of an officer serving on the Western front. In one of his letters home he describes in vivid fashion what lie calls “a charge through hell.” “ You never saw such a mess in your life as there is where I am now,” he writes. “I am not allowed to say where, but it is one of the famous spots, once a smiling village, peaceful, with pretty women, fair lawns, gardens, grand industries, quaint buildings, a beautiful church, and lovely wayside shrines. Now it is past desoription; just a mass of ruins. The streets are covered with debris, the fields ploughed with shell holes; the rivers ai'e even so choked with weeds, etc., that they refuse to (low. The only thing that compares with it that I know is Edgar Allan Poe’s fantasy, ‘Shadow.’ Desolation reigns ■ supremo. ‘‘l saw eight ‘Jack Johnsons’ hurst to-day, and they just tear away bricks and mortar like paper; it is simply marvellous. You first hear a noise like an aeroplane, and something passes over your head leisurely on its way; then a bang like nothing else in the world, and after that dust, bricks, trees, and, if any, limbs and hits go shooting up a hundred feet in a cloud of thick black smoke, which lingers like a fiend contemplating its work. The ghoulishness of it all occurs to one when in churchyards the graves get blown open. “Who is going to put it right? I don’t know, but the mess here will take fifty years to clean up. I wish you were here to see it all. Tt is so wonderful and yet so fiendish that any man who saw it would join up at once to stop'for ever the Germans from forcing a rule of this nature upon the world. They must be smashed even as these small towns arc, and then should be made slaves to work in perpetual serfdom to repair their hellism damage. ° “What would strike you is the awesome deliberation of the war. You can hardly imagine how cool and calculating the whole business is. When you read in your papers, ‘ Britisli Advance Three'Miles in Flanders,’ it is impossible to realise how much work it has meant. In the last battle we were in, and a very big one, too, you could see troops moving in thousands for days beforehand. Everywhere men, men, men—and then the guns begin. You did not seem able to move for the guns. Bang, boom, boom —all day, all night; no cessation of the noise at all—just one big, long roll all the lime. “Everywhere, as far as the. eye could reach along the German, trenches, was smoke, and when we did see the trenches afterwards they were just craters, with hits of men in them, dead and mutilated. Then, after days of this undiluted hell came the infantry attack. It seemed grisly and strange, the clammy sort of silence as the big guns gave up and only flic Maxims and the rifles went off. You can imagine the ‘dirty work’ that was going on—bayonet and revolver and rifle. “We lose heavily. But what a price for the Germans! They lose double what we do. The artillery, when they got it, get it bad, but the infantryman has not the same chances in the, open, for they blaze at him all the time, and lie lias to charge through hell. Fancy a man rushing out to stop a fast railway train with a. walking stick. Well, that is just what the infantryman docß when lie goes oil the parapet in the face of the machine-guns. “If yon had seen wlmt I had scon you would not believe that men could face it, but they do. These Scotties are the boys. The Germans tied some of them together at Ncuvc Clnipelle and ‘bombed’ them to death. You have no idea of the dirty tricks of the Germans. They spray men with petrol, then send over incendiary bombs which set fire to them. But don’t worry, we shall deal with them all right.. lam not down-hearted; ‘an eontraire,’ I am very happy, my only regret being that I cannot see you.”