THE NEW WARFARE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1854, 18 July 1918, Page 1

THE NEW WARFARE.

WHAT A BATTLE LOOKS LIKE. SCENES DURING A RETREAT. Describing the conditions of warfare on the British front during the German offensive, the correspondent of the Morning Post wrote: —What would, I think, chielly strike those who saw a battle for the first time would be the distance that usually separates the combatants. "When you read of the enemy being “driven back,” or of our troops “giving way before superior numbers,” you must not suppose that there is necessarily a mix-up of the two forces, or even that they get very (dose to one another. What happens, as a rule, is something like this; The opposing troops are in improvised' positions in woods, groups of ruined cottages, old trenches hastily deepened and parapeted, sunken roads, which in the north of France are so plentiful, river or canal banks, quarries or brickworks, or, perhaps, out in the open, each man scraping a little hole in the soil for himself. Almost incessant is the chatter of the machine-gun. There is much manoeuvring to get these into the best positions for playing upon the enemy. Our men all give the Germans credit for quickness and cunning in this respect. Their noncommissioned officers have been well trained for this duty ever since it was shown by the development of the machine-gun during the Rus-so-Japanese War that this would be one of the principal factors in future infantry actions; The German private is not much of a rifle shot, so our men say. There are a number of enemy snipers who are dangerously brilliant marksmen, but the ordinary soldier is not much to be feared. This does not greatly am tier, however, seeing the extent to which the machine-gun has taken the place of rille-tire. It has it Iso become a more effective killing engine than artillery. In all the accounts of German losses the same refrain occurs—“mostly by machine-gun lire.” This means that a large proportion of the wounds are soon cured. If a man is hit by a fragment of shell it makes a jagged wound, and generally keeps him in hospital a long lime. A bullet wound either kills or makes a (dean hole, which quickly heals up. What generally happens in a battle, which really is a number of small lights engaged in by groups of men in the front lines, is that after a while one side falls back, either because tin 1 other side's lire is toe hot or else because the enemy has pushed in between it and (he next group and is enfilading it —(hat is (o say, firing upon it from the side. The greater number of bursting shells do no harm. Seldom in open warfare of the regular kind do troops gel near enough to each other to throw bombs. Not often are positions held long enough for bayonet charges to be possible. Over a large part of the present battlefield open warfare is not of the ordinary kind. It is not really open. As I have mentioned, we are fighting in a big area in an old system of trenches. Both we and the enemy move qp apd down these, coming fairly often to clime quarters. As there is no definite front line, it is easy for men of one side to stray over to the other by accident. A German soldier rode into a party of our 'men on a bicycle. He had no idea he had got beyond his own outposts. Another German, a gunner carrying a telephone box from his battery to an observation post, took the wrong turning and found himself in our lines instead of his own. Often small detachments of troops discover that they are in hostile counti’y, and either slip off unnoticed, or have to tight their way out during our retirement. A battery of Royal Horse Artillery was “lost” for three days, and turned up at the end of them hungry, but otherwise none the worse.