In the West

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVIV, Issue 41, 24 January 1916, Page 6

In the West

A COMPARISON. CAPTAIN BEAN IN *HE WEST. GALLIPOLI AND WESTERN FIGHTING. (Special from Australian War Correspondent.) ~..

London, January 22nd, 7.30 p.m.:—! By the kindness of the British War Oitice I have been permitted to pay a, visit to the British front in France and Flanders which I was particularly desirous of making in order to be iahle to draw a just comparison between the conditions of that campaign in Gallipoji and those of the great struggle on the Western front. My experience of the officials dealing with correspondents has been, from first to last, that far from putting difficulties in the way, as is the common supopsitiou, they have consistently gone out of their way to help one in the performance of Press duties to the'fullest extent consistent with the regulations. 'Hie Frenches at Anzac were much the hest in Gallipotf and incomparably more elaborate than the best I have seen in France. In France the troops making trenches have to struggle the whole time against the influx of water. Except for a portion of the summer when in earthy Flanders, as in the lower parts of Gallipoli, the troops on the Western front have taken constant steps against the encroachment of water. They tunnelled trenches like those of which there was a complete system around parts of the Anzac line which would immediately fill with water. In most parts of the line here these tunnels would have to be shored up heavily with wooden props and roof-beams. The system of deep dug-outs into the hearts of the hills into which a great part of an Army Corps could be marched and live; there ;so long as they wished in. perfect security from any known projectile, would be quite out of tlie question on some parts of the Western front . The conditions at Anzac made it possible to dig there with immediate labour what were probably some of the best trenches known to military science. The artillery fire in France seemed to me to be about as constant as Gallipoli. The target for the German guns here is nothing like so crowded and concentrated as the closely peopled areas of rfelles and Suvla, On the other hand the Turks were not generally such good gunners, and.,l doubt if their explosive was always, of .the most modern. The fearful bombardments which both sides administer to the other in France and Flanders were never approached in CJallinoli. exceot by the French guns,- and on a few occasions by our naval guns when they caught the enemy coming down the

seawards slope of the hills. Th#, AlI lied lines in Gallipoli were never subI jected to such torrents of shell as preceded and succeeded th© battles like ' Loos and Neuve Chapelle. } The tension of the trendies at GaJJ lipoli, especially at Anzac, was eonj siderably greater than in France. The old line at Anzac originally hung on ; to the edge of the hill to the top of the cliff, and the only way to create a second, or third line was to constantly push forward and steal ground under the enemy's rifles. This work never ended from the day we landed Ito the very last week. Constant sap-| ! ping, tunnelling and running along 1 the whole line, at immense labor, finally produced two or three and sometimes more lines of wonderful | deep trenches!, and brought our lines in a number of places within twentyfive yards of the enemy, and in several places to fifteen yards or closer, j .Mining, which was unhampered by water, was continuous with the enemy | along a great part of the line. The enemy was constantly mining towards us in order to deprive us of our narrow | ground, and though the Turks were utterly out-classed at the game, this made the normal tension along the front line greater than it seemed to me to exist in portions of the which I saw in 6 ranee.

. The whole great system of the hinterland which so impresses every visitor to the Western line, i s that immense convoys and heavy lorries camped on the roadside, or trouping slowly across flats, were of course absent in Gallipoli. Our hinterland ended f*om half a mile to a mile-and-a-half from the trenches. The efforts of shell-fire produced heartrending spectacles. In one case a civilian was lying face downwards in a gutter; an old woman running towards a tragedy or away from it; young wives and little children standing at open doorways with strain imprinted on every line of their pale faces. We sawnone of this in Gallipoli. There you did .not feel the presence of the real living enmity, which in spite of the cheery faces gives a constant sense of seriousness in the trenches in the West, The combat in Gallipoli was not fought with weapons like gas, or even with the newest and greatest guns and projectiles. The army there had to do with what they could conveniently procure. For example the bombs on both sides, on the whole were more old-fashioned than in France. The strain of hand-to-hand bomb fighting was more general in Gallipoli because thealines, on the whole, were closer. v Summer in Gallipoli was trying owing to the dust and heat and especially the flies which resulted in far more sickness, but I if the weather conditions were so disagreeable as the mud, rain and slimy wet of the crumbling trenches of the Western front. The real discomfort of all in the Gallipoli campaign was that whatever the discomforts—there were shells, rifle fire, flies, the untold hard work of tunnelling, trench-digging, food and water carrying, lack of wood and iron, und last but not least, the lack of canteen Stores (such as tinned fruit and butter) —it was impossible to obtain relief from them. The brigades were in the trenches from four to five or six months without relief. The socalled rest camp was often within a hundred yards of the firing line and always under shell fire, and "rest" consisted largely of mining, and water-carrying, so that the units honestly preferred the trenches. The Army Service Corps ambulances coming to the hospitals were always within'range and possibly lost a higher proportion of men from shell fire than if they had been in the trenches. The Brigade Divisional, even the Army Corps headquarters, were much closer than many battalions of the headquarters in Franco.

In short, each field of war has it peculiar difficulties, but what I have see in France convinced me that the Gallipoli campaign ha 8 been rightly estimated a s one of somewhat exceptional, though unavoidable hardship.