STORIES FROM THE FRONT

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 27 July 1917, Page 3

STORIES FROM THE FRONT

. TOLD BY THE FIGHTERS. \ ivid sketches of the recent fighting around Arras have been obtained from woiuiclecl men by a correspondent. A ;faan .from a heavy trench mortar battery, explainmg his part in the fighting, said: "We did our whack in the preliminary plastering. X used to be in the black squad at sea before I joined the Army, and stoking a furnace and trimming bunkers in the Red Sea was a picnic to the work we put in. Lord, we did let eia have it; it was like blowing in eight- weeks' pay in one day—and our big stuff simply lifted everything in sight. We carried our guns up at night to a new position ; two hours of mud-plugging after 18 hours at the gun. Then I got hit. I was asleep on the stretcher before they got me to the dressing station, but the game was great while it lasted!"

I am a 'wounded' yet not 'wounded,' so to speak," said a medium trenchmortar gunner. "We had been working hard at a job when a bit of Hun stuff hit one of our bombs as we were loading it into the gun, and we got a premature burst. I am pretty well hit all over with small bits of stuff, but nothing serious. I don't rightly know whether it counts as a proper wound, though I think it ought to. We trench mortars get forward quicker than the guns, and we have to work a great deal lieare'r.' Of course, being medium mortare—not the heavy size—we were up in our new positions as soon as the infantry had dug in. I saw some of our heavies and the ' flying pigs' they used. -They are wonderful things in mortaira, too, firing a huge torpedo over a long range. They can't move up quite as quick as we can, of course, and they need a pit and cover to fire from. They are all right for steady / trench work: or bursting special dugouts, but it's our medium bomb guns that are handiest in the push.'' "We saw some queer things," said a private of the Chester Regiment. "There was a little rough, chalk stream there, not big enough to be a river, even with all the wet we had had. The Germans, had built an accommodation bridge across it at one point, just a rough business of planks and ropes. When we crossed it>—they hadn't bothered to destroy it, it was not big enough to be worth while—there was quite a float of dead Germans in the water,"all bumping against the piles, and some had gas masks on. How they came there or what had killed them I don't know. We hadn't time to worry about for there was plenty''doing, •but men in gas masks drowned in about three feet of water was a queer thing to see."

' .The barrage ran along in front of -us whipping' np fche earth in spray," just as yon see a heavy rainstorm splashing off an asphalted pavement," said a n.c.o. of the new armies. '" "We followed so close that some of our men. got tickled up with clods of earth, and we were coughing with the smoke. We were all marvelling at the way the gunners worked it, for, mind you, this was when the push was over a week old. and they had to bring the guns up and find new positions for them. We got to our objective all right, and had it in good defensive order before Fritz tried to get it back. He got a surprise then, too, for a bunch of our men who had got too far ahead the day before, and had been lying doggo in a bit of old trench, fairly browned tnem with the Lewis guns before we could open on them. We got to our fellows a bit later; there was only half a company of them, and they had finished their iron rations. They were just hanging on till someone would come up and get them out. It's a- queer mix-up this open fighting, but, take it from me, the German's have very little stomach for open fighting, and none at all for liand-to-hand work with- the steel."