GREAT BEAUMONT CRATER

Hokitika Guardian, 6 February 1917, Page 3

GREAT BEAUMONT CRATER

Strewn With German Bodies. (From W. Beach Thoma 3 ) With the British Army in the Field, Dec 9 The murk that has settled down over the country has added the last touch of brutality to battle-fields always incredibly brutal. Perhaps the siienca helps. Few and fewer she’ls whine through the fog, and more and more of the few thump into the mad without explosion. Ail the firing is blind ; aud perhaps for that reason each shell fuller of fear; for the finer courage is debased into fatalism and mere reliance on the law of, average. And in the mud aud mist you notice the detaila of the battlefield in more particular detail, now that the general view is cut off and all ground is dead ground. For continuation of news see fourth pag^

The great crater by BsaumontHamel looks like the bed of an emptied lake strewn with the bodies and biis of the bodies of its old deni* z s ts. Here we ble w up a qaantity of G<-rua'; ■in2-'-u , B laurelled into the

ifidr- of she older craur; aad tbe eoeeeasive of expl-mive, besides doiog their deadly work havs altered the landscape. Cl.ee by, at the bottom of a treocb, the Germans lie head to Iml etrung out in a line wb re they rush d from the escape month of their ring- >ut into a oascade of bombs and pirnaps an enfilading rifle. Egg-bombs and oyster-bombs and hair-btush bombs are scattered every where—small refuse left, it might be, by a receding tide, along with the burden of mud-drowned bodies.

Day after day and night after night our burial parties have been at work. At any moment you may meet tbe padte returning with his group of men from the latest field buiial. The business is nearly done, but it never ends. The Germans lived in this quarter for two years, working all the time, and left more oaves than could be reckoned in a day, even if the shells had not rooted in the trough of mud and rubbish for five months. Stores and tombs still lie undiscovered and diggers a century hence will still find discs and chains that were to announce the identity of the victims. The power of ugliness could no fsrther go. Everything visible and audible or tangible to the sense—to toueh, smell, and perception —is ugly beyond imagination. The hanks of wretched and rotted wire suggest that the very soil has turned into a sort of matter hostile to all kindly productiveness. And so will the waste look till spring comes and proves that after all fertility lives. Indeed, lest mere disgust and despair should be bred by the spectacle of rnio, nature is already sending a message of spring, a miracle of the season.

The miraole is this: that the battered trees, jast now as bare as telegraph poles, are putting out young, green leaves; and in one plaoe great eomfrey leaves sven now conceal the very whereabouts of a trench we pounded and oaptured daring the battle of tbe Somme.