THE POUNDED TRENCHES.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15195, 16 April 1917, Page 5

THE POUNDED TRENCHES.

CELLS FOR LUNATIC GERMANS. (By Win, Philip Simms, of United Press) With the British Armies in France, March 6. One reason why the Germans retreated along the Ancre was because they were fast becoming a garrison of gibbering lunatics. Their position had become more hideous than the scuppers of hell. Mud, bottomless in places, and the ceaseless pounding of the British guns, had turned their positions into stench-pits, too horrible for human nerves to stand. > The United Press correspondent was the first American permitted to penetrate across the gruunri evacuated by the Germans as far as Thilioy, toward Bapaume. Madame Tussaud's waxworks chamber of horrors was as cheerful as a May day compared with this field of terrors, painfully pictured at each step. I zig-zagged around stagnant cesspools and interlocking shell craters, in which the water was the exact colour of blood. This might have been due to chemicals in the high explosives which rent the holes, or to the nature of the ground itself. J found myself stepping on German bodies which littered the t.-gion They were in all im-ginable conditions and positions—sometimes piled sev? - al d •*-:•;•. J saw arms sticking full length out of the mndHhat concealed all d&e of the bodies to which they were attached. There were legs, feet, half bodies, or heads alone protruding; Some lay face down, some were jirone on their backs, exactly as if asleep. PILES OF GERMAN DEAD. At another place, on a pile several rjeeo. lay a boyish officer, fair as a girl, with his arms thrown back and his bluo eyes staring to the sky. His sandy hair had been brushed back modishly bv the rain. Imagine scenes like this covering miles. Imagine every trace of vegetation long since blasted away. Imagine

the earth powder-stained and churned up from ten to sixty feet deep in depthImagine mud so bottomless that the German prisoners claim their men frequently were swallowed up whole hi attempting to cross after dark. This is the territory the Germans left. The German prisoners told us that communication trenches had been wiped out by the incessant British fire and the mud,* so that relief and revictualling was difficult, nost dangerous. Men on such missions '-ere caught bv the British machine-guns sweeping in the darkness, and could not be saved.

It was impossible to save them thus cut off by the destruction of the communication trendies. The dead were left where they fell. Two attacks in November left scores of dead Germans outside the trenches. They have remained there until now, when the British are burying the remains.

Such was the sink-hole occupied by the Germans. The scenes were too horrible for human nerves to withstand. They make quite believable th* stories of soWiers who became raving maniacs. It is quite possible, that m the withdrawal Germany to use her troops elsewhere in a bio; oi??nsive, but the British are undisturbed. One outstanding moral of the German retreat i« that wherever i;he Germans stop their retirement, their new positions cau be reduced to the same hideous, unendurable quagmire of cadavers and muck, where crisped dead hands clutch from the mud at the Kaiser's men, and dead eyes stare at them from the slime, defying even German discipline to hold live men in line.