MUD!

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2981, 19 January 1917, Page 5

MUD!

BY ONE WHO KNOWS IT WELL

OUR WINTER ENEMY

'Hose at homo in England, with their bxperienco of -war books and photoGraphs of Zeppelin raids and crowded hospitals, arp beginning to imagine they know all. there is to know about war (says "V.8." in tho "Daily Mail.")- The truth is that they still have hub little idea of tho'life in the trenches, and, as far as tho mud is concerned, they are delightfully ignoraut. They do what mud is. They have read Napoleon's "Fourth Element," they have listened'to descriptions of'nrad in Flanders and France, they have raised incredulous eyebrows at stories of men being drowned in the trenches, thev have given a fleeting thought of pity for tho soldiers "out ihcro" as they have slushed home through tho streets on rainy nights; but they have never realised what mud means, "for no photograph can tell its Blimy depths, and even the pen. of a Zola'or a Viotor Hugo could give no adequate it. i Aid so, till tho end_ of the war, the old story will be , continued —while the soldier flounders and staggers about in that awful, sucking swamp, 'the j)essimist at home will lean back in his armchair and wonder; why we do not advanoe at toe rate 1 of a mile an hour, why we are not in Berlin, and whether our Army is any good at all. I? such; a man would know why we are not in German territory, let him-walk, on. a dark night, through tho village duck•pond, and then sleep in his wet clothes m. tho middle of the farmyard. Then perhaps he would wonder no more, and he would realise a little what mud and wet are.- It is the infantryman who suffers most, for he has to live, eat, sleep, and work in the mud. Tho plain of dragging slimo that stretches from Switzerland to the sea is far worse to face than the fire of; macMne-guns, or the great black trench-mortar bombs which corao twisting down through tho air. It is moro terrible than tho f rast and the rain—you cannot even stamp your feet to drive away, the insidious chill the mud always brings. Nothinc can keep it from: your clothes and hands and face; tliero is no taking off your boots to dry_ in, the trenches— you must lie down just as you are, and often you are lucks, if \ you have, two empty sandbags to save you from the bold embraco of tho swamp. ' '■'

Incredibly Slippery. But if tho mud stretch is desolate by flay it is shocking by night. Imagine a battalion going up to the trenches to relievo another regiment. Tho rain Somes pitilessly down on tho long .trail of men who stumble along in the blackeobs over the pave.. All the men are ■well loaded, for, besides his pack, rifle, and equipment, each man carries a pick or a bag'of rations or a bundle of firewood; there is no smoking, for they are close to the enemy; and there is the thought of four days and. four nights of watchfulness and wetness in the trenches. Presently tho winding lino strikes off the road across tho mud. Thia is not mud such as we knew it in England—it is incredibly slippery and impossibly tenacious, and each' dragKing footstep calls for a tremendous effort. The men straggle, or close up together so that they- hardly have ■room to more;* a'man trips over a telephone wire which runs from the "trenches to the battery-f-when he Scrambles to his feet again ho is a Mass of mud, his rifle barrel is choked with it, it is in his hair, down his neck, everywhere. He staggers on, thankful that he did not fall into a shell hole, when matters might have been', much worse. Just when the- men are waiting in the open for the leading company to file down into the communication trench a German star shell goes up, and a machine-gun opens fire <a little farther down the line. As tho flare Sinks down behind the British trench it lights up tho linen, nil ' crouching down in the swamp, while the bullets hiss by .above their heads.

After winding along a quarter of a ■mile of communication trench they file into tho fire trench. Here tho mild is even worse than on tho plain they have crossed. All the engineers and all the trench pumps in the world will not keep a, trench decently dry when it Tiiius for nine hours in ton and when tho trench is the lowest bit of country for miles around. Tho moit tan do nothing but*- "carry on"—the parapet must he kept in repair. whatever the . weather; tho sandbags must be filled however wet nnd sticky tho earth. Tho mud'may nearly drag a man's boot off nt his every etep—indeed it: often dons; but the man must go on digging, shovelling, lining tho trench with logs, bricks, tins, and planks, iri ,thp hope that ono day he may have put.'enough flooring into the trench to reach solid ground beneath the mud. ,

The Creat Enemy. 'All this, of course, is only tie infantryman's idea of tilings. From n tactical point of view mud has a far greater importance—it-is tlio moat relentless enemy that an army can be called upon to face. Even without mud and without Germans it would be a. difficult task to feed and look after .'i million men on the movo; with these two discomforts movement becomes almost impossible. ''What has happened_to the 'tanks'?" people ask. Nothing has happened to them. They have'dono wonderful work which lias been interrupted by bad weathor. You cannot expect a weapon far heavier than the average-steam-roller touiovn with ease in ttireo or' four fcob of slippery, clinging mud. Jfc is only when you havo seen a battery of field artillery on the movo in bad weather that you can realise aI; all the enormous difficulties of a wiritei; advance. You must watoh the tyrses labouring and plunging in mud that reaches nearly to_ thoir girth; you must sec the sweating, half-naked men striving, with ■ outstanding veins, to force the wheels round; you must hear the sucking cry of tlio mud when it slackens its, grip; and you must remember that this is_ only, a battery of light gun H which is being moved. It is the mud, then, afc present, which is tho great wicmy. If tho talk of the "tanks" and the Great Pnsli dies down, people m England should not ho dishearlened. "Out there" wo aro facing one of tho worst of foes, and should the advance Blacken and stop, tiie vmi will bo the cause—not tho German guns.

The letters in "Kaiser Wilhohn"count 13. Also tho names of tho Kaiser's dupes-each contain 13 letters. Thus|\ajici3 Joseph, Tsar Ferdinand, and Sultan Mehmed V. Those of his heroes have ■ likewise 13 letters—von Hindenburg, von Falkenhayn, and Count Zeppelin.