ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3159, 10 August 1917, Page 5

ON THE WESTERN FRONT

SCENES AND INCIDENTS IN A QUIET TIME. (From Malcolm Ross, Correspondent with the New Zealand Forces in tho Field.) Belgium, June 8. To the men from the sunny lands of the far south even the late, halting spring of 1917 was a great delight. After weeks and months of grey gloom and frost and snow and slush the clear suu, slowly increasing hia "warmth, seemed to make new men of us all, but more especially of the Australians and the New Zealauders. The fields quickly becamo emerald, the fruit trees a riot of gay blossom, and the delicate tracery of tender green that ran with the straight unending roads of Northern France and Belgium—roads built, some of them, originally, by the Romans—was a delight to tho eye. The birds had come almost before tho lato spring. On a very cold day, on tho edge of Ploegsteert Wood, I saw the first swallow nervously fluttering near some batteries that wero beating the air with tho sound waves of their methodical shelling. He seemed strangely out of place. Overhead the droning 'planes came and went, and tho big balloons, with their strange pig-like lugs, their hanging ropes, and thoir dot of a cage, rode, with a slightly swaying motion, against tho blue at intervals behind our bending line. Brigades of infantry and artillery came out of tho lino in turn, and perfected themselves by further training. _In robust health, tho perfection of physical fttuess, with swinging stride they marched back along tho roads again—back into tho region of Bhot and shell and hard, unending labour. One always felt sad that such fine men were coming back to bo killed and wounded. But it was not all work and death and wounds. There was timo for a little play as well. In tho winter there wero football matches, and with tho warm summer weather and the hardening ground cricket camo in. The New Zealand Pierrots, with an oxcollent orchestra, and more than average talefit, had practised assiduously, and drew crowded houses, much applause, and a considerable sum of money for the canteen funds—that wonderful Pandora's box, which does 60 much for the armies iu the field. Tho regimental bands, also, relieved tho tedium of trench warfare, and cheered the mon. One of tho canteens near the front came under shell fire meant for some and had one end blown in. Tho officer in control—formerly an Auckland wholesale grocer—reporting tho occurrence next day to tho Q Branch, added laconically: "Business as usual to-day at the other owl!" ;