WITH THE NEW ZEALANDERS.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16143, 22 February 1918, Page 4

WITH THE NEW ZEALANDERS.

AFTEE PASSCHENDAELE'

(From .MAL r OLM Ho??. Official Correspondent with the N.Z. Forces.)

BELGIUM. December S

After the Passchendaele fighting the New Zealatiders went back to that quiet, retreat which I described briefly in an article written on October 3rd, and there spent three peaceful weeks in training and recuperating, llecently thev came again into the line not far from Ypre=. They passed through the famous ancient city, still strangely fascinating with its ruined houses ;md the shattered walls and towers of its cathedral and its Cloth Hall, which, surely, should be preserved for future generations as an object leson of German rutlilessness and destructivcness.

You c.m motor "well past the town now, and for some distance along the Monin road. Leaving your car you walk along a broad road and over zigzagging duck walks across the open to our ncrw front line. On every side are names that will remain for ever famous in the war history of this generation. Zillebeke, St.. Elois, Hill 60, Beceleare, iS.anctuary A\ood. and the Chateau do la Hooghc are among them. 01 the Chateau. of the hamlet of the same name, and of the surrounding woods naught remains. They have ceased to exist. The Belgian nobleman, six generations of whose family have lived in the chateau. would not now be able to trace the confines of his demesne. Mis_ treasure*? ! of art. indeed all his belongings, have ! gone the way of the chateau. Rut tlie soil has become sacred to the British Empire. '-Thrilling scenes," says Heckles "Wilson, the Canadian war correspondent., "have been enacted in this park—the flower of the chivalry of England and France have perished in its defence. ... It was to Hooghe that, were borne Ihe dead bodies of Fitzclaronce. Cavendish, Wellesley, '\\yndham, Cadogan, Gordon-Tyennox, Hay, Kinnaird. Bruce, and Eraser, a.nd not 1 far from there they are chiefly interred. Close at hand also is the grave of the brave young Prince Maurice of Battenberg." Echoes of the Middle Ages and stirring memories of the immediate past crowd in upon you as you go through the shattered town of Ypres, and the desolated lands and hamlets. In the salient- the sacrcd dust of men from thi, confines of Kmpire—of men from Australia. and New Zealand, has been mingled with this Belgian soil. SCENES OF DESOLATION. It was the dawn of a frosty morning when we went through Ypres on the way to our front-lino trenches. Not far beyond the spot where wo had to leave our car we entered upon a scene of desolation such as it is difficult to picture or imagine. On either side of the broad road the • fretted earth had been torn again and yet again by German and by British shell-fire. "Waves of battle had ebbed and flowed about a land that but a few short years ago had held smilinß hamlets and green fields and woods. Now. over thousands of acres the trees and the grass and the houses had been wiped almost clean away. There were, it. is true, a few rubble heaps of reddishbrown brick denoting where houses had stood, and there were the branchless and broken trunks of trees that told where woods had been, but nowhere could you see any grass. The earth was bare and brown. It is land that has been watered by the blood of brave men, but for many a long day there will be no harvest, but the harvest of victory, for so sorely has the land been scarred by trench a.nd dug-out, by shell-hole and mine-crater, that no pVmgh can surely enter it in our day and generation. THE KOAD OF DEATH. Not on any part pf the Belgian, British, or French front—l have not been to Verdun—have I seen anything comparable with this destruction of hamlet, wood, and meadow land. The shell craters are rim to rim over square miles of countryside. Tn places even the edges of individual craters have been blown away with subsequent shell-fire, until they form irregular ponds with miniature peninsulas and archipelagoes of little clayey islands. This morning the ground was frozen hard and the ice was .an inch thick on all the ponds. Men had to break through with an axe or some stout stake to get water. Since tlio frost other shells had burst, scattering the ice on the road and the, frozen clay. And then the water had frozen once more. There were ponds that had in their icc- a crimson stain. On either sideof the road was the debris of furious war—broken waggons and gunlimbers, barbed-wire, unexplodcd shells, and dead horses, with mouths agape. All were frozen into the brown soil, immovable. The sun came up over the bank of smoky grey horizon mist that prevails in winter time, throwing all this battle wreckage into greater relief. It was through such a scene that our men marched once more to the front, but one now passed it by without a shudder, for custom has staled the infinite variety of its horror. Of the protruding limbs or the hideous grinning face of some dead German, half buried, or disinterred bv somo new explosion, little notice is taken, for such are ordinary sights in our daily life. Beyond the road the track wound across the open, and steel-helmeted men passed to and fro carrying up material to strengthen the position we had won or returned empty handed for stakes and wire, for ammunition, food, and water. Across the shell-torn land before the frost had come it was difficult to walk in the sticky mud, but now you could cut off corners and walk with ease—so bard was the frozen ground. Rising gradually we approached the great mound or "Butte" where the enemy in his underground, stoutlytimbered warren had withstood our heaviest shelling.

From the Butte yon got a -wonderful view of the country to had conquered, and of the positions wp have still to conquer. Ono marvelled more and more at the valour of the British armies in the field in gaining such strong positions. The German may drive ba<-k an Italian Amy corrupts] by insidious propaganda, he may treat with impunity the armies of Russia in the throes of red revolution, but all the time it must ho a galling; thought to him, in spite of all his generations of military preparation, ho cannot beat the British and the French, nay, more, that he must give way, from positions that he thought impregnable, before the valour and the e>kill of France and of England. TO THE FRONT LINE. We pass across the open, threading our way between the frozen pools that have filled the shell-holes. Ahead, in the direction in which we are going, the German balloons, high in the air, are observing. Planes fly overhead, droning as they go. At times there is the Durst of machine-gun fire from the sky, where friend and foe are engaged in uncertain combat. You pass beside broken machines that have crashed to earth, or that have, in the words of the communique, been "brought down out of control/' and think of the fate of daring pilot and his ohserver. Do their graves lie near at hand? Are they lying sorely battered in some base hospital? Or are they in the air again, looking for fresh adventure? =

■VVe are getting near the front now, and drop into a communication trench the first we have seen in an hour's walk. Walking across tho frozen hummocks has neen like walking across the lateral moraine of some great glacier, exceut that the frozen clay and &and

are lc& slippery than the glacier ice, and the colour is brown instead ot dark iirev Inside the tunnels ot the Butte, when a battle is raging, the n°ise of the artillery is like the continual dull roar n f the waves as heard in some seaside cave. We haro passed \ strong line of trench and wire, hlown out of all semblance of a line by our own artillery. Wo hare noted the Orotic square blockhouses and pillWe<- 7 ' that sheltered the German machine Suns and their gunners, and :J a ; n wo wonder at the feat of British arms that has crowned this ndge -with victory. .. we aro in the front line trench It, too, is narrow and sandy nnd dry. As yet it !s not revetted. \t times the enemy sends a few shells to it across the waste of No Man's Land, and at night he mixes his shelling with poison gas. We have passed Battalion Headquarters with its telephone wir« leading to ;l holo in the ground. We lift the fl ip of the door and peer into the gloom where the British commander is workinc bv the light of a candle It is open, and is an uninviting habitation. For the time being, it -s home to these greatly daring men from the Antipodean isles. But. our Battalion Commanders are philosophers, if not fatalists, and one bas even heard them in such circumstances quoting the refrain of tho modern song: "Any old placc where I bang my hat Is home, sweet home, to me."

Only hats are not taken so far afield; Hounets oi steel have taken tiicir place, aud the gas helmet is also very close at band. On this morning of which 1 am writing the front line was comparatively quTet. A few enemy shells looted away to the left, there" was an occasional stutter of machine-gun lire on the right, but only one shell fell near us. It was one aimed at tho Butte on our return journey. Yet there are time-? when the roaii and the tracks up which we have come are not healthy places ior a soldier, let alone a civilian. A battalion commander told uio that he had cut out a hundred yards on that road the other day in as good a time as he had ever done it in his best sprinting days. With one of his officers, he ha i got caught between two barrages, but, by timing the fall of the shells, they decided that they could just _er through, and, makibg a dash for it. succeeded. The old idea of strolling unconcernedly forward in the face of shell fire is nowadays abandoned by the wisp man. When the shell fell near us on our return journey a Staff officer who was with me ducked. "1 always duck," he said, "I've seen a man killed at five or six hundred yards by a snlinter."

In the trench our snipers wore constantly on the outlook. In their own language, they had got the Hoc-lie snipers down. With their boots swathed in sandbag wrappings, to keep their feet warm, they looked, like Shackletons in the South Polar regions. Sonic others were sleeping in little dug-outs in the comparatively dry sandy soil, with their feet protruding into the trench through the sacking doorway. One man was coaxing a piecc of solidified alcohol into flame to make himself a warm drink. He had not been able to sleep much because of 'the cold, but he was quite cheery and interested, and intent on the operation in hand. The Germans were quite close, and had been putting out wire in the night time on the edge of what had been a wood. Our men sometimes got a glimpse of them in parties of twos and threes, and then the rifles of the snipers rang out.

The Divisional General with whom I made the trip was busy all this time studving the situation. He likes to see for himself, for that way success lies. In the course of the morning we got extended views far into the enemy's terrain. On th G horizon _on the leftfront there loomed up a ridge that will not be easily taken. We saw Moorslede. nndestrnved, amidst its trees: the broken buildings of Ghelorr>lt and its ridge,: and, fronting it. "Polderhoek Chatenn. near which brave men of the New Zealand Division harp fallen. But of this more anon.