THE WAR BENEATH THE EARTH.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2368, 26 January 1915, Page 6

THE WAR BENEATH THE EARTH.

' idimrM PJEENCH TRENCHES f JOHES-WDHvlirrailY "HiLF-WMEr' FOR- THE SOUP

••"'■ Q '- :Ward " Price « the "Daily ; -Marf'-Trar correspondent, who has ;. >' tour a t the front r in©,.courteous invitation of the . branch Government, contributes [. tins very-interesting article -on-liis experiences.

; ;'■. ; "■; Paris,. Decembar7. \.)J "WmrtTou go Trp to the terrace and ■ 'rnS 6 /?' at the Gennall tenches?" •.■ J-oo Ganerri was as casual inTn*s invi"tataon as a suburban stockbroker asking you to come, and see his rose- ; vgarden. . So wo-aU climbed up the iron ■staircase,.staff officers in brilliant scax- •: ,lot and sky-blue, journalists in the unprtirlike dowdiness of mufti. There is :rtno whole -of this war before', your eyes, 'two lines of white chalk soil thrown i;p, ; Uand the fate, of seven nations being set- ; |t}ed;att.-ihe strip of fifty yards between [ttbem.. Not a man to be seen, nbo a ; igun;. though there is a' soldier.-to very ii-yard-'of trench, andthe finest artillery ; lin the world is hidden in the ground ■ t-ckjsa to you. In the last two months j 'the Germans have lost 40,000 men along 1 (}"*£. stretch of front on which yon are I looking and never has there been any- >• thing more to see than you see now— II most, deadly and: most invisible of i ."wars;'''"." '._:.-.'■'. '.•■'; -'

i .;There-are many other earthworks, \. 'yoa, notice, besides those parallel lines I of -'firing-trenches. No . one '■ would i i reach the latter alive who tried to td- ! 'vance:to them over the level ground. : !bo ; tho hillside behind each line—French : 'and German—is carved into a network ;' '-of./ approach. trenches, gangways,' acd I and alleys, criss-crosnng here j 1 andthere.a sort of subterranean Hampr ; fen Court maze. From where we !■" stand on slope, on the opposite side' :■. or.-the broad .valley-, you get "a broad- ; angle; view.,that,gives ryou a good idea ; of the .intricacy with which they writhe ; and. down' the hill. "Boyaux,". the [ ; French call these approach trenches— ; bowels; it is;not a,nice word, but it ex- ,- presses the idea very. well. ■ f ; ■ The Sharpshooter's Lair. | , When yon have got trenches as close ( as these there is bound to be very little } doing in them. For if you raise .your j, head above tho level of the ground to ; fire you-get a bullet in it before you j: have got the barleycorn into the V of ■ your backsight. Each side has aharpJ shooters always watching, who are well ; ; protected .behind a ,parapet of earth ; pierced; by, a loophole through which !. : then- rifles are constantly levelled. j These sharpshooters stand there with \ their eye constantly aJong the barrel, j finger ready on.the trigger, watching ! the:parapet of the trench opposite'as' j intently as a -cat watches a mouse-hole ! m the ,waIL They are waiting for some !■ incautious enemy to show a eingle | square inch of himself above the level lof the ground-—two men passing each : other in the : trench; for instance; one- ' of them steps up on to the banquette .to make more room and does hot stoop j low enoughto hide the top of his head; ; or even only ■ a hand raised to take [down the rifle always lying ready on the i parapet. If you pushed up as much as i a. lead pencil, in fact, above the line of ; . the ;_trench, bang-bang-bang" would go 1 the rifles of the" German sharpshooters : before you drew it down again. It is ;'■ hard work, -feis: rigid waiting for a : momentary mark, so the sharpshooters ; relieve each other as often as every ,: . quarter- of an hour. \ :

i '":" Sometimes, the chief of the general's j. staff toH me, these tunnels driven by bothi-sides towards the other's line have ! met.' One set of miners has suddenly ; burst through into the other's worklings. And tnere in the blackness of : • suffocating tunnel, nar- , rower than a grave, men have fought, ■ . clawing at each other's throats with ; their bands. If you hare been down the model sappers'' workings on Salis- | , bury Plain, for instance, you may have ! a faint idea of what the ghastliness of these subterranean encounters nrast be. •Tinder the best conditions they give you ;• ithe greater' part of the sensations of • 'being buried alive.

' The various armies engaged in this ... campaign eeem to have different types ;N of trenches which they normally con,j struct. Those of the Germans are serA pentine, running like the stalls of a [ ;cathodral choir, each man separated ; ifrom his neighbours by buffers 'of learth. Some carefully-built Belgian [firing trenches that I went into were ; hrimply a ditch, with the earth that :. (had been dug out piled in' a flat bank . iin front of it, while along this bank ■were planted a row of loop-holed steel ! _hat entirely covered the head _ud shoulders of the men as they stood ■up in the trench to fire. The front ; ,:wall of the trench was hollowed out I" into caves where the men slept. _ During our journey to the French Jines I had the opportunity of e_aminfirig some characteristic French trenches .' thatearned the approval of the general hvbo was taking us round. You went *own into them by a little fright of four mud steps, for the enemy was so ;far away that the men could approach l i±_em •in comparative safety over _ie aground. At • the bottom of the steps , you were on the floor of the trench, ~_.!.vhj_h was.a gutter a foot wide in j-whicn the rain-water was to collect. In ifront of this was a banquette—a shelf —18m. wide. When a man six feet .liigh stands upright on the banquette *,_he parapet of the trench, which is imade- of sods of turf, comes up to his .chest, and the earth which has been jdug out is spread out in front of this P3rapet m a gradual slope down to the level of. th e ground, so thai from a lit-tle-distance the trench cannot he distinguished. There is five yards of •{trench like this, then comes a wall of joartn—an epaulement; ft is called— •round which the trench makes a rightangled detour, and then .comes five /more yards and another epaulement. Utner trenches that I saw were for permanent habitation, and had the rear wall hollowed into.straw-lined;dug-outs, they wore also roofed-over with planks and tnrf.

Thicket of Barbed Wire, r Aml forty yards i£ front of tho trench is a dense thicket of barbed wire a gigantic cat's-cradlei ten yards broad running along out of sight over the shoulder of tho hill.. The General explained that .the Germans at night rwDlcreep up to these' entanglements: If they are discovered by the noise they .nnako some of them open fire on tho ,-reaches beyond while others try to hack : a way through'the network of tearine (tangling wire They bring great shears :to do it with, and sometimes the cutters protect themselves with steel .'shields like .tiro buckler of a Roman legionary. Meanwhile the French soldiers do not need to expose themselves, to . fire Their rifles lie on the parapet of the trench, pointing along tho level of the ground, and, without raising their heads, they have only to raise their hands to pull the trigger and work the bolt. Their bullets aro sure to find a billet in the mass of Germans forty 3'ards away. But when we had taken leave of the General and driven through Zouchery on our way to Reims, we came to a place from which we had a sight at even closer range of trenches that were so near that you could almost jump from one to the other. For along the Toad from Laon to Reims French and German posi-tions.-aro but six yards apart—separated only, by tb© width of tha narron_

These unspoken periods of trnce are observed in a very sportsmanlike manner. There is a sort of daily olose season. For instance, here on the Laon road it has come to be mutually agreed that men bringing up the soup from the kitchens in the rear shall not be fired on. On both sides they come up over the open ground in full sight of the enemy's nfles. It arrives much hotter that way than when it had to be carried laboriously along narrow approach trenches. _ Then there is a sort of daily. "halftime" early in the morning, when a man may get out.and stretch himself in safety so long as he leaves his rrfle behind in the trench. And French and Germans "chip" each other quite goodtemperedly at these times. Then as soon as all .are. back in their trenches again they watching for the chance of a.snap-shot, and to raise a finger, is to be hit. News for Cermans. "The other day," ■ my officer friend told me,_ "we got a newspaper in our trench—it was passed up through about a mile of saps. It had some good news in it about German reserves in. Flanders; so after we had finished with it we polled it round a stone and tossed it over into the German trench. 'Danke ■ schon;' we heard half a dozen voices say.; linen a gruff Prussian began to translate the war news, and wechuckled as we heard the Boches swear. When they'd done there-, was a lot of whispering, and a little while after something white suddenly rose above the edge,of the German trench. We let: fly at, once, but stopped when we saw it was only a white rag—once part of a shirt—stretched between two rifles. And on it waß daubed tho words, 'Hier, 100,000 Russes prisonniers.' "That was the German way of getting their own back. And. all the rest of the day we were both in very, bad tempers and swore loudly at "each other from one trench to the other. And that night the Germans tried to stop us from getting any sleep by pitching stones on top. of ns. They are very childish when they're ruffled—les Boche3." ' .

road. Six yards I I talked for a long while to an officer who had been in them. You can hear every word that

me. enemy says, an enemy you Dover eeo. for to raise you head would be instant death. "You get to bo able to recognise individual Germans by their voices," said the offiocr. The strain is terrible, of course. Quaint Situation. Night and day, especially at night, you Lave to be,ready lest the Germans should suddenly leap in upon you and stab you before you have time to seize Jotir weapon. It is a quaint situation. Men. who have come from East Prussia and men from the Mediterranean 6hore —here they aro only 18ft. apart. This proximity has, perhaps only naturally, rather a humanising effect on war. You caa hardly share a narrow road with a man for six weeks without finding some good points about him. And 60 tacit agreements have grown up about when the men shall fire and when they shall not. These imspoken periods of trnco are observed in a very sportsmanlike manner. There is a sort of daily olose season. For instance, here on the Laon road it has come to be mutually agreed that men bringing up the wrap from the kitchens in the rear shall not be tired on. On both sides they come up