Manawatu Herald THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 1918. THE TRANSPORT PROBLEM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1839, 13 June 1918, Page 2

Manawatu Herald THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 1918. THE TRANSPORT PROBLEM.

A CORRESPONDENT, writing in an English magazine, mentions some of the difficulties encountered by the attackers when advancing after a successful bombardment of the enemy’s line. “The essence of war, ' says the writer, “lies in the conveyance of a certain mass of men and material to a certain point in a certain time. That side which accomplishes this operation most successfully will win on every occasion. A tract of country that has been successfully bombarded — and even more if it has been for some time unsuccessfully bombarded — is in very truth blown off the map. All those of its features, contours alone. excepted, that would appear upon a map have disappeared, and their place been taken by a sea of earth. Such a terrain resembles nothing so much as a rough seascape turned solid —or, what is worse and more frequent, into mud of varying degrees of stickiness. Imagine such a belt of country from two to five miles wide, in which the shell craters or wave-troughs actually touch, and are of depths varying from two to a dozen feet; seamed everywhere with an intricate network of ragged ditches, which were once trenches; and consider thq problem of driving one single motor ’bus across it, or ‘h motor ear, or a horse-drawn ammunition waggon, or a cart or a wheelbarrow! Suppose that the line has been broken on a front sufficiently wide to let the cavalry through, and that anything from ten to thirty thousand of them got through. In either case the guns, men, and horses must be fed. The shell of an eighteen-poun-der—to take the lightest and most mobile type —weighs with its. cartridge some 231 b. The gun can fire twenty rounds a minute; its moder-

site daily expenditure would be 150 to 200 rounds —ten tons of metal for a battery. The horses must be foraged; another ton of oats alone. It'can carry with it in its own vehicle one day’s forage and rather Jess than one day’s ammunition, and it occupies a quarter of a mile of road space.’’ But, the writer points out, cavalry alone is not sufficient, and division after division of infantry must bo poured in, and field howitzers at least, “with a shell alonc weighing 351 b,” brought forward to deal with fortified localities, improvised field works, and areas that the low trajectory of the eigh-teen-pounder cannot reach.: “Every hour of respite given to the retreat means more and heavier guns to break down the defences that will have been organised during The breathing space. Ordnance of a calihrb larger than five inches —and this includes practically all siege and heavy artillery—can only bo pulled and supplied for any hut the shortest distance along roads, and metalled roads at that. The eigh-teen-pounders themselves were unable to advance on the Somme until tracks had been levelled for them by pioneers and working parties.”