WITH THE ANZACS IN FRANCE

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2805, 24 June 1916, Page 10

WITH THE ANZACS IN FRANCE

THE FIRING LINE AND THE COUNTRY BEHIND (From Malcplm Ross, Official Correspondent with tho New Zealand Forces.) Northern France, Anzac Day. A visit to the firing lino in Northern Franco impresses upon one the altered conditions under which our men will have to fight, as compared with uallipoli. The transition is from an unfertile, hilly, unpopulated country to one of flat lands, intensely cultivated, and densely peopled. 111 Oailiiio", from almost any. point in our circumscribed area, you obtained extensive views over laud and sea. Here, if you wish a distant view, you must climb a tree or r. church tower, aiid the effort in either direction would bo likely to prove a most unhealthy occupation. Even morn than this change of scene and conditions, you are impressed with the vastnosa of the operations nnd the almost diabolical scientificness of modem warfare as practised on the Western front. As your car rattles over the "pave" you come to the conclusion that Franco is full of troops, and the endless lines of motor lorries that you pass indicate that no effort is spared to feed the army with tho hundred and: one things that are necessary to its success. You note with some amazement numbers Tunning beyond twenty thousand. You wonder still more "when you are told that there are some forty thousand motor-vans in this,secl)or, In addition to all this, you meet many motor-bicycles and motorcars hurrying to and fro. The horse also is here; but he has been relegated to a comparatively unimportant position. Behind the lines are the railways, and a wonderful system of tramways leading up to and running parallel with the British and German lines. After the intense 'concentration at Anzac, itfiere only n few hundreds yards separated Army Corps and Divisional Hjadquarters, and even the head commands wero under shell and rifle fire, the distances hero seem greater almost than they are. : Corp9 Headquarters are miles behind the lines. Divisional Headquarters are miles in front, but still miles from the trenches. Much petrol is needed to eat up these distances. Even from Brigade . Headquarters . you have to walk (i few miles along the roads and through tha saps before you reach the firing line. From the- time you leavo your car until you get back to it you get quite a lot of exercise. . " '

Cultivation Close Up. Tho peasants, scorning danger, cultivate their fields well within the battle zone. Just now tho woods in all this region where we have come .to fight are bursting into leaf—a glorious sight in tho warm sunshine. I'he ground is carpeted with wild flowers, which children gather, heedless of tho sound or the guns. Old inen ploughing and women harrowing the fields pursue their daily tasks with grave unconcern. France must ba fed, and upon them and their children the duty lies. Right up to within a mile <-r two of the firing line there is scarce a bit of arable land that is not cultivated. And there is promise of an abundant harvest. The gathering of it may be a more difficult problem. AVo may. bo sure that tho pationt genius of the French people will solve the problem. But one has already visions of aircraft sailing in the summer bluo and dropping incendiary bombs in the ripening corn. .. .That, however, is a gama at which two can play, and with bur stringent blockade Germany will bo tho greater sufferer. In villages that have been badly battered the people have gone back and have reopened their little shops to sell to the soldiers. As we drive into one, two young children come down the road wheeling a barrow. In a field with the shells screeching overhead, and bursting'well beyond in tho land we hold, ,an old man with a white horse is unconcernedly ploughing his lonely furrow. It is such a strange sight that th'6--Anzac9 in tho trendies think he must be doing it to give the Gorman gunners a line on which to fire. Already there is a recrudescence of the spy mania that seized hold of our boys in the early days on Gallipoli. But the hid man. is undoubtedly just an ordinary peasant doing his bit in theworld's greatest conflict. <. The Shattered Villages. Close up to the front we reached a village where a hundred shattered houses told their terrible tale of war. In all that village there was .scarce one pano of glass left.whole. The red-tiled roofs and most of the brick walls' had been either riddled or blown to bits.' Shops, houses, churches—it was all the same. Piles of bricks ami mortar lav on tho floors, and from the debris the lares and ponates of former denizens, rich and poor, protruded. An iron bedstead, s-fiaabed crockery, a black bowler hat, a. woman's skirt, children's- toys, a broken crucifix, were sad mementoes of t|ie pleasant family lite that had existed there but a few nionths ago. Through the holed and tumbled walls of a shopi we were able to take a short cut past a street corner. Thence-the disused road along which w© walked was pitted with great shell holes.

Frequently it is the inanimate that presents tho saddest pioturo in. war. A deserted, broken .house, an unused road, appeal to the imagination aver more than ;t wounded man. Only a few miles beyond tho village this road was busy with the tireless traffic.of War,. Here't Was a relinquished melancholy way, with grasß already sprouting in t]ie iiistretices of the "pave." . At night they said it was swept by a German maphinegun. As we walked along it a . Mauser bullet meowed over our heads and buried itself with a thud in the green 'field. A solitary steer was eating, liis fill of the lush grass in tuat neglected meadow. ■

We passed a brewery, torn with shot and shell. Smoke was still'coming from one of its chimneys. "By jove, it takes a lot fo stop them working,", said our guide. But we (omul the vats empty. The old brewery was being used as 1 a field dressTsj-stntion.

In Sap and Trench. A few hundred yards farther and we descended into ft sap—a shallow, narrow, wet, winding trench. It did not give one a, pleasant feeling of safety, but tho mud and the dull water 'niuler the "duck-boards"—a battened way with thin latticed iron to keep your feet, from slipping—indicated clearly that while jnu nnght build lip you would not very well dig down, at least without much pumping. Compared with our communication Jrenchcs on Gallipoli it. did not appear to bs well made, but there we hhd dry ground to deal with. Working parties, however, were already trying- to better tnis trench, scraping oiit the mud .".ml slush from vnder tho lifted "duckboards." Away down in the south we could see two of the German' sausageshaped, captive balloons "high in Hie air, observing. We also have our balloons, and ,no doubt in this flat country they di wod work.

rWf-ivay up the trench we found the commander, in gum-boots anil a ".'British Warm," sitting in his dugout. A shell hail burst in front of it, and had broken the little window pane. ''They didn't /et my garden, though." said the colonel, directing our gaze ili'rongli tlif! broken pane, where we noticed a small Bo* in wJiTcli a few prim- J roses were blooming. The colonel came with up to the firing-line. The trench still wet and riinddy. In plac? Hie i "duck-boards" were up for foffairs.. The j Tn'ticed iron on them had been wcrri throng!! in places bv'lhe.tramn of mar. feet. The tronch had probablv been in nsa for eighteen months—so slow is progression - in. modern, trench warfare. "This is called Snt'etv Ali'v." said the, colonel, adding sententious)?, "because it. is tho most unsafe place in the line." The Firing Line. « In thn firing-line we found nn Australian battalion already making itsejf at home. Everywhere tlißre was mud or-slush or water. In places behind the line the water bad gathered in green, slimy pools. Yet the. dug-outs, or such l , as we looked into, were fairly comfortable, and being above the level of the water, and boarded, were dry. The men in their steel casques wore scarcely recognisable a.s the same soldiers that had fought at Anzac. They had painted their helmets with a coating of the yel-

low trench clay, so that observers in the German planeii might not see them. Our men. had already been supplied with gas-helmets, and there were double flaps to the dug-out doors to help to defeat one of the most devilish phases of modern warfare that the Bosche has invented. But gas attacks do not profit tho enemy much in those days. The most recent helmets invented by the British seem to give .in almost perfect immunity from gas attacks. Tho other day we saw an Anznc doctor, wearing one of the new helmets enveloped in a cloud of gas liberated experimentally, and he came through it quite safely. Without tho helmet he would have been dead in a few minutes. We have also secured an adequate -protection against the use ■of lachrymatory shells and bombs.

Our men had been for several days in the firing-line, and had not seen a single German, "We can hear them talking and singing," said one of our snipers, "but the worst of it is we cannot understand what they say or sing." The Gorman trenches were only seventy-five yards away. The trenches here were infested with rats. They have come ovor from tho deserted villages in which there is no longer any food for Mem. "How do you kill them " we asked. "Wodon't ltill them," was the reply. "If we did we should need a fatigue party to bu,ry them next morning." On another day wo visited a different section of the trenches. In the communication trench there was an ngly gap where a high explosive shell had burst. We passed a ruined monastery and broken houses in the fields. If in Kgypt it required the. exertions of a Siyphu.s to keep the sand-blown trenches clear, here, surely—at least in winter—it must need tho labours of a Hercules to keep the trenches dry. But spring is already with ue, and summer is at hand, so tho lot of our men is, after all, not altogether an unenviable one. In the woods the birds are in full song. The cuckoo is here, and any evening yon can hear the song of the nightingale. It seems altogether out 'of keeping with tl\9 | deep diapason of the guns.