THE GALLIPOLI HAND

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 7918, 14 August 1917, Page 4

THE GALLIPOLI HAND

AT THE OLD GAME. (Australian War Correspondent, C. E. W. BEAN). BRITISH HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, June 1. It was on the second day after a heavy fight. Two mornings before, in the dawn, after drenching the Hindenburg trenches with trench mortar bombs and artillery throughout the night, the Germans had made their carefully prepared attack, with the Lehr regiment and special assault troops, against our holding in their line. The officer commanding the Australian battalion which drove them out of the trenches was an old Gallipoli hand—one who had lived for months together like a hermit in a little dry clay dug-out in the side of a deep sap, and sniped Turks daily as a good Light Horseman should when their buff skull caps could be seen creeping through the holly scrub on the slopes beyond Gaba Tepe. This was his first big fight in France; his battalion had been through one tremendous night’s work, but that was before he came over to command it. . He had always a good yarn to spin in the old days, so a couple of us went to find him. At the tiny hole in the ground which formed his headquarters they told us he was up in the line. We threaded our way up the long shellpounded dusty way, with its ghastly relics of a fortnight’s hard fighting, through the remains of the Hindenburg wire, battered down much as a wheatfield is battered by a hurricane; worked up the dusty old ploughed field of the great trench itself—both sides were in it time arid again in the early days of the attack, until it was little more than traceable in parts —running like the old dry bed of some droughty watercourse amongst the shell-holes. THE SNIPER, On our way to find the Colonel we came on a little group of men in dusty, war-worn clothes, lining a rather wide shell-hole. We had heard the crack of a rifle as we came up the trench. There was an occasional distant pect from the Germans, and once or twice a rapid succession of shots near by. Evidently some Australian sniper was having good shooting. The report of a rifle, which used to be continuous day and night in Gallipoli, is almost an event of itself in France; if you hear half as many reports of a rifle as you do of an eight-inch howitzer it is time to ask what is causing the disturbance.

We came round a comer of the trench on to this group in the shellhole from which the activity clearly proceeded. Two men seemed to be doing the shooting over the top. Two others were observing. Out on the dry shell-pitted slope, seven or eight hundred yards away from them, which formed the opposite incline of a shallow, spoon-like valley, a couple of Germans were hopping from shell-hole to shell-hole across what once had been a wheatfield. They would disappear from sight for a time, apperently in a trench along a road, but always reappeared where our shells had broken the. trench down. The Germans wtie trying to conduct a relief by daylight, and it had to cross this precarious area before it reached the white chalk parapet of a further trench where the country was still green. One of the men in the shell hole fired twice quickly. The hurrying Germans nipped down into some crater. The Australian rested his rifle on the bank in front of him and looked around.

It was our old friend of Gallipoli. “My word!” he said; “the best shooting I’ve ever had. We are touching the beggars up. Sometimes they have the hide to try and cross the open—that’s when we have somefun.”

There came an exciting yelp from the man leaning beside him. “Dere dey goes—oh, Colonel, queeck, queeck —now by de white trench, queeck!” It was a French or Russian Australian who was lying by the Colonel’s side, observing for him—as keen as a greyhound in the leash.

The Gallipoli hermit let off a clip of five cartridges as fast as he could fire—they noticed the dust flick once or twice near the hurrying figures before they dived into shelter again. The Colonel put down his rifle, and turned to talk. Once or twice an answering bullet from some German away in that pink hillside ricocheted off a lump of earth somewhere in the foreground, and went singing far overhead. It might have been a day at Anzac.| THE CORNER OF DEATH. He had a place he wanted to take us to, this Colonel. “Awfully interesting,” he said. “I was there yesterday. You ought to see it.” And so he took us. The Germans and ourselves occupy the same trench in the Hindenburg line. Our troops seized a section of it on May 3rd; the Germans remained in the adjoining section and ever since they had fought up and down it. We had barricades at the end of our portion of the trenches, and the Germans had barricades in their trenches about thirty yards further on; and there were thirty yards of abandoned trench in between. It was into this section that he took us; out over our barricade into the dry winding, crumbled trench, where on one lived. The midday heat trembled in the dry, pink clods around; the green flies moved here and there over the pink crater sides. Except for that, we might have been in mid Sahara.

The fight had been tremendously heavy in that corner two mornings before. The Germans had attacked, and in that region the last remnant of the attack had been wiped out. On the bottom of the trench lay four Germans, the red facings of their grey uniforms as bright and their color as clear as if they had laid down there to rest. The trench was littered with the debris of battle—old waterbottles, bombs, odds and ends of kit. At one point there stood against the trench wall, exactly as they were left when the owners were killed or wounded, the rifles of some small Australian outpost that had once held the trench some way in advance of our final position. Once while we stood there the noise of hammering came from not far away. Someone was tacking up a

notice board on the entrance of a dug-out, or delving a stake into the trench side! The sound came from beyond us. It was the Germans, at work in their trench.