The Battle of The Somme

Horowhenua Chronicle, 30 August 1916, Page 3

The Battle of The Somme

PKEI/IMIIVARY PHASES. DAZED GFRiMAN PRISONERS. I (From Malcolm Ross, Official War Correspondent with N.Z. Forces). With the .British, in the Field, July 3. After careful preparation and wonderful organization behind the lines a British offensive luis been launched against the Germans in France. The French are pushing next to us north and south of the Somme. The Germans thought no doubt thev had finished them at Verdun. The .surprise was all the more effective. With a dash and a determination, for which they were ever famous, the splendid French troops in this push have been remarkably 'successful and have won new laurels. The scope of this combined offensive is as great as it is important. Apart from the fighting the traffic along the J roads is in iself an amazing sight. Its control is equally wonderful. Big motor lorries pass and repass staff officers dash along the roads. Motor cyclists flash by. Great guns with motor tractors on caterpillar wheels crawl across the fields like Saurian monsters come to life again. Ammunition columns advance toward the firing line, and motor ambulances, their red crosses half hidden in a coating of dust. , running smoothly. and slowly return laden with the human wreckage from the battlefields. High above the cornfields ugly "sausage" balloons strain at thin ropes of steel that hold them captive; the observers, often sick with the continuous swaying motion, watching through their glasses the slow swing of the battle pendulum down below. Higher still, the fu*t, battle planes gleniu in the bright sunlight, or, like dark birds of evil omen, remain for a time silhouetted against a silver cloud. In the night long columns of troops march along the dusty roads or leave the trail of a column of tours across the clover and the wheat fields— a trail that remains visible for days. It is all very wonderful —amazing I But the most wonderful thing of all has been the bombardment of the uovmau lines. Day and night, without intermission, but with varying degrees of intensity it has gone on. In many places it has blown the German trenches to bits. Tt lias changed, as if with a magician's wand, the already-battered buildings held by the German soldiery into heaps of red rubble. It has heaped ruin upon ruin till amidst the general jumble a man might well have diffi cultv ill picking out the site of his own house. And what is more to the purpose, it has killed large numbers of Germans. I should doubt if m any phase of this war a greater number of shells has been poured out in a. given time along such an extended front, ft has played such havoc with the German lines of communication that it was with difficulty they got food and water up to the firing line. Wounded and unwounded German prisoners manv hundreds of whom we saw had in their faces that grey scared look that tells its own tale of torments of mind and of bodily fatigue and shuck endured. With a haunting reiiembrance, of the ordeal they said 't was terrible. They were la mixed 1' I — not, of course, seen at their best—b it amongst them were some fine strap pin ;* fellows. Many admitted that Oarmany could not now win-the most they' hoped hoped for was a draw -but in any case the war could not last miioi longer! One thing was certain — namely, that their morale had been shaken. Few there were who were not pleased to be prisoners, fewer still who, could they regain their liberty, would care to go back.

"Day and night we watched the bombardment from a vantage point that overlooked the battlefields between the iSommo and the Ancve. Bv day it was a spectacle of clouds of smoke and dust -by night a scene of strange glowing lights and flashing illumination. And all tlic time the grand arpeggio of the guns. The intensity of sound varied with the region from which one listened. The nil* was tremulous with the throhhing pulsations of hundred* of

guns of different calibres. It was altogether diffeient from the bomlj.iDiluent in Gallipoli. where the guns al' the ship booiue.l across the sen aiiu our own cannon rev. iiterated amongst the hills and dales. It was different from the thunder of the New Zealand batteries at Armentiores, where an intense bombardment nasliee and echoes like a great thunderstorm. Here in this open, gently rolling country it is not a thunder, hut rather a continuous pulsation of sound, beating so quickly upon the ear that the beats almost become uncountable. And there are strange variations in the waves of battle sounds according as they are affected bv configuration of country. Currents and pools of stagnant air also play their incomprehensible parts. The booming of the bigger guns is said to have been heard in England I Here they are largely merged in the gigantic, continuous pulsation. It is as if one were listening to the heart beats of the world itself—to the pulsing of n great troubled heart in which the rhythm was broken by the bursting of huge 15howitzer shells and the explosions of great mines packed literally with tons of ammonal.

The volume of sound reached its maximum pitch when hundreds of trench mortars all along the line began to hurl the heavy explosive shells in graceful curves to fall with terrific bursts upon German trench, parapets and h-ii-l-e" wire entanglements. - At last. nftoi many months of weary waiting, the en einv was getting hack with compound interest a sample of his own dovi'ish devices for the destruction of mankind.

At about 7.30 a.m.. when our infantry attack was launched, when the trench mortars ceased and the guns lifted their fire, there was a considerable diminution in the great pulsation of sound to which our ears had become accustomed. Then came the cracking of rifle fire and the devilish tattoo of the eiiemv machine-guns as our men climbed over the parapets into what had been for so long "No Man's" land, but which in a few minutes now became ours. These, their staccato bursts softened by distance, came faintly through the sound of our own cannonade and the somewhat unrerta!" and hesitating barrage of the enemy gunners but to practised ears tliev were easilv audible.

The grass was wet with dew and tlir morning mifits hung low in the valley and on the slopes beyond where the death struggle was now hegun in real earnest. The smoke and dust of battle mingled with this haze and blot-ted out the distant landscape. Gradually as the morning wore on. the visib'lily increased. And presently out of the thick ha/.e we could see slowly emerging the toppling Virgin of the steeple of the church at Albert, bent at an angle by the German shelling and Vace downwards, but still holding in outstretched hands the infant Christ. Appearing in this wise out of the mist and the smoke of the battle the giant, figure still held upon its bent girders of iron seemed a mute protest agiinsf the "kultur" of a cruel and destroying nation.

From that day until now the great attack has gone on. at times developing into a series of battles. One would almost have thought that nothing could live through the hail of shell with which we battered the German trenches. Our own wounded and officers and men whom we saw afterwards on the actual battlefield, smilingly eon-firmr-d the stories that the German prisoners had told us with haggard faces and still frightened eyes. Yet the pick and the shovel in patient toiling hands are great and effective adjuncts to the bayonet and the gun in modern warfare, and the enemy has used them to some purpose. Sheltering in their deep dug-outs in trench and ruined Tillage, many Germans saved themselves and their machine-guns long after trench and parapet and parados had become indistinguishable, the one from the other. From these machine-guns and from the German shrapnel and high explosive our gallant British soTdiers were met in many places with a withering fire that might well have dismayed them, and thinned their ranks and dotted the sward with gallant dead. In other instances the resistance met with was feeble. A company in one place got into the front line without a casualty, and into the second trench with only three. There were gallant deeds done that day. and if there were a hundred eyewitnesses with the most graphic pens instead of only six or seven they would fail to do justice to the heroism of the "contemptible little army." Yesterday. in company with a press officer and my colleague Captain Bean, I had a unique opportunity of witnessing at close quarters a battle indeed one might almost say two battles— in which our troops performed prodigies of valour. Well within the great circle of gun fire we saw the splendid work of our gunners and watched our men go forward to attack almost impossible situations with determined and unflinching heroism. Tt was an opportunity that conies to a correspondent only too seldom in this war. but it enabled one to form a true estimate of the valour of the British rnce. In a subsequent article I will endeavour to describe what we saw.