THE TRUCK OF A TANK.

Hokitika Guardian, 27 June 1917, Page 4

THE TRUCK OF A TANK.

--- BRAVE RBDfO OF THIEPVAL.

(From W. Beach Thomas, War Correspondents’ Headquarters, France).

Returning from one of the villages just abandoned by the Germans, I was tempted by a memory of last November to cross the Ancre below Tbiepyal and visit the scene of tlie greatest of our local victories. \Ve. .walked first through at least a thousand yards of funnel eat by the Germans in the clay and chalk of the valley wall and panelled throughout, both walls and ceiling —a monument to German labour. Thence emerging into the sunshine we climbed the j cliff and opened, fo view the doom of j this blasted downland, where pit and I pond and ditch and ridge and inI verted tree roots are still spattered with whitened bones and shrivelled limbs and the offal of battle: blue ' and khaki stuff, bits of gun and rifle . and spacfe. and pick and wire incorporated with discoloured lumps of erupted chalk. In such a “ waste pf spirit and expnnso of shame.” the eye, and perhaps. the mind, gropes for any single certain support. Mine found it in a dim but .broad and easily trackable : double track.

It topped the ridge, descended in a line - perfectly straight in one direction yet inextricably up and downi It passed over continuous shell-holes and< ridges and over cross-trenches till it found a highway along the wire edging a straight trench. Here the track was floored with crushed barbs and streaks of rust and spiral posts of iron.

At last the trench curved a little and was widened by the. .crater of an pfght-inch shell. Here the maker of the track careened and fell,, in its collagse Samson-like crnshing in the mouth of a dng-onf, -the temple of the German.

ft lay there still whole and unbroken in the scene of its triumph, where it had led the Northamptons to that quick and thorough victory of which, we see the fuller fruits only to-day. _ '

THE crew’s KESTINfi-PfiACE

Close beside, the only tended things ir. a waste of ruin, are the graves of its brave captain and his chief helper. They lie ip the cup of a shell hole, iu visible, like the gpim engine they drove with snch courage,;, till you stand almost on the lip of the crater. The track of the tank beside .them is their path of glory. In all oiu* island story did eygr volunteer go foifh to the sister tracks of honour and’ duty on a stranger, more venturous quest ? Before snch a grave distinct thoughts, and even conscious eimtjons, disappear into.au indefinite, an infinite pity. Odd and well-tried shre.dsof verse swing into, the memory. I found myself mumbling lines from “ The Burial of Sir Jolm Moore ” ; and when fast we looked hack on that desert nq. thing, is green, no tree or bush or house erect, the longing for anything other than this hideous waste brought back older and yet simpler lines such as no qne will ever \yrite again -.

Thy gardens and thy gallant walks continually are green, There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers as nowhere else fire seen. We returned through Thiepval Wood where few trunks —apd they but a few yards high—are erect, where rpots are more obyious than boughs, and the, ugliness of ruin is at its summit. At the foot of a shattered tr-pe just at the wood’s edge, we found at last a single plant, the coronal of a blueheU announcing spring.