"A WAR OF MACHINES."

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 3, Issue 251, 27 November 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

"A WAR OF MACHINES."

AUTOMATIC DEATH DEALERS. SUFFOCATING SHELL FUMES. (By 11. Hamilton Fyfo, "Daily Mail' Special Correspondent.) " This is not a war of men. It is a war of machines." A wounded officer was speaking, and speaking bitterly, for he had seen more than half the battalion which he commanded swep; down, as tho tall grass falls to the mower's scythe, by the terrible mitrailleuse. " There is an appalling soullessnoss about it," lie went on. " It is savagely inhuman. Men turn handles and death tlies out 'in large bundles.' " (I translate literally to give the phras e is full effect). " What this battle has been—it is all really one battle, the Marno a-nd the Aisne —no one can even conceive who has not soon tli<> battlefield. Men conLj never kill one another by heaps, by hecatombs. They would sicken at such wholesale slaughter. They would cry out, 'We are soldier*, not butchers. A battlefield should not be an abattoir.' Only machinfcs ingeniously constructed to destroy nun as locusts have to l>e destroyed when they sweep over a fortilo laud, only automatic death-dealers without heart or j)ity or remor.so conld carpet the earth with dead in this frightful way." That las: phrase is surely Kipling's. Writing in a wayside railway station on any empty packing-case, I cannot turn to a shelf and look up " Kitchener's School," where I think I could find it. But in any ease the officer chose almost exactly the same words. And almost everyone I talked with in that train of wounded crawling down to the south spoke in the same horrified way. One tall cuirassier told how, after charging a mass of German infantry through and hack and tlien through and back again there was " a wall, but.

I preaching it in horror. The only consolation is that the German dead aro far, far more numerous than ours. But even so. even though they are our enemies, and barbarous enemies, how can one reconcile such sights wich civilisation, with Christianity? If these bodies so thickly strewn were bodies ot animals we would feel sorry. But men, monsieur, men! Never has the like been seen since the world began. That sounds like exaggeration. Some of vou may incline to think it not far removed from hysteria. You may say, "These, men have never seen battlefields before." A FEARFUL MEMORY.

Well, here is the testimony of ono

WELL DUNE."

('APT. NOEL GRANT OF H.M.S CARMAMA.

"Well done. You have fought u splendid action to a success lini-li."

■ man wounded and prisoners a're all hungry:-" 11 had my doubts about tho stories that they had leen reduced to wolfing raw beetroot with lumps ot earth sticking to it. and evtn to eating hay.)

"It is, so far as my experience goes,'' she answered. "Something must have gone wrong with their supply trains. The first thing the wounded ask us for is 'something to eat.' Many of them have told us that they are lucky to have !>oen picked up by the French, since in many places the Germans have. killed their own wounded. It sounds unlikely," she went on, seeing I looked incredulous, "but who can tell? They say so themselves.'' "But what ignorant Imjoi;> compared to our soldiers, and to yours also! They have no education. It is no wonder they commit atrocities, when they urc encouraged by their more brutal officers. 'lhey are clods, more like animals than men." The 6tories of the long battle which tho men told —wearing German helmets or fur hats many of them; nursing their wounded feet, or stroking arms which chrobbed with fever, or resting bandaged heads against carriage w'indows—were bewildering in their garrulous abundance of detail. Out of them .'ll one or two stand out.

There is a story of a motor-car convoy which charged a couple of troops of German dragoons. Out of a wood ih ( v troop,rs rode and began tiring on the cars, summoning them to stop. The driver of the fust—-ho w>em]ts to have taken the direction of the tight—opened out full s|>ecd, and In fore the dragoons it the cars were going through them at about 50 miles an how.

TheiVi wa.s a tremendous 'bumping About, majiy were unbolted, ispjvVrai liorses ran away, two or three poor brutes had their legs broken. Fortunately not one fell before the leading car, or the charge would have been stopped. As they charged the motorcar men tired, but did not do great

Afterwards w« must set about making slaughter on this vast scale iinposbible. But now our business is killing. We must have plenty ot the bet killing machines.