THE GREAT ENTERPRISE.

Hokitika Guardian, 13 October 1917, Page 4

THE GREAT ENTERPRISE.

WHERE ANZACS ARE FIGHTING. (Commonwealth Official Correspondent.) Loxoox, Sept 20 Australian and British troops liave just been launched in a most tremendous.attack. The bombardment is such as lias not before been known. The British battle front is now advancing behind that barrage both to the right and left of the Australians. Before the Australians, as at Pozieres, stretches conn try which is rhe summit of the battlefield. It is.one. long hare ridge sloping down on the south to the plain beyond Messines, curving on north past the little valley of Hannebeek, and farther streams in one long sick ! e of hills standing out, front the Flanders plain. Three years ago this ridge was clothed by the great, trees of Polygon Wood, around Zounebeke racecourse, where the first small British army was made for ever glorious, and where the Canadians and British Held on fighting inch by inch after the Germans had broached their first vile gas cylinders. To-day that same ridge is just one long bare red flank of mother earth lying naked to the skies. On the nearer end, front four red praters and relies of' the recent battles, hang the few gaunt black stumps of Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, and, where the valley dips down the northern slope to Hannebeek, before powdered brick heaps, which once were Westhoelc village, lies the wend of Nonne Boschen. Reyond this, up a further slope from Hannebeok, can be seen the broken farm and buildings known a.s Anzae.

To the right of all this, from Glencorse Wood, runs the bare gentlyrounded crest of the mam ridge. At the further end, against the eastern horizon, are a few more blackened stumps and a big brown earthern mole, like tailings from a copper mine, That, with low undergrowth a few feet high, is all that remains at this hour of the famous Polygon Wood.

That desolate country, where the face of nature has been flayed, pimpled all over as with warts by concrete blockhouses, and pitted as by smallpox with water-filled craters, is the battle-field into which onr boys were launched a few minutes ago. For days they have been inarching up into it—strong, silent columns, seen by the flicker of guns tramping up long roads by night, long files of determined men wending their way over the crater-field by day. One has never seen them in more magnificent, heart. Every man seems to have some pet bomb or bayonet which he is nursing for the Germans. They went into battle as Australians generally do, not singing and laughing as many British regiments, but very grim, very silent, with their officers marching qnietly at the head of each string of men. The new portents of this new battlefield opened themselves around them —the new German gas shell and the new 1 German incendiary shell, which lights up the whole expanse with one gigantic rose-glow like that of the blowing up of an ammunition dump. For several days they -held the line under a gradually growing torment of shells, which the Germans poured in in retaliation for our increasing bombardments. Now r , under the thunder of the mightiest artillery ever concentrated, they have gone into one of the world’s mightiest battles. Dust-smoke has swallowed them up. By the time this reaches Australia the communiques will probably have told the fate of this great enterprise. We do not know it yet, and from where ikorne of ns are waiting for news it will be difficult to get it away for some hours. One can only say they went into this great test the same grand, whoje-heartpd Australian boys who took Pozieres, who stormed Gallipoli