PAST BAPAUME.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 1 June 1917, Page 6

PAST BAPAUME.

PIHST DEIVE THOuGH GEEEN

COUNTEY.

A GLIMPSE OF GEEMAN EEAEGUAED.

Australian War Correspondent,

C. E. W. Bean

FEANCE, March 21

The troops were five miles beyond Bapaume. The evening before they had occupied the part of the fourth German line, which ran opposite the Australian front at about two and a-half to three miles beyond Bapaume. There had been some slight fighting, in which a German officer was killed, at Delsaux farm, near Beugny, through which that lino ran. During the night the infantry push ed on through Yauix and Vraucourt. As we drove up the main road into Bapaume, and turned into the town, we noticed that th e barns along this part of the roadside had been destroyed by "blowing out the wall nearest to the road. When the side wall Avas blown doAA'n, the roof collapsed into the building, and lay drunkenly on the ground. Building after building had been destroyed in the same Avay. In the centre of the town is a big oblong square, Avith the tOAvn hull on the northern side of it. The floor beams of this and all other houses had fallen in, and often Avere still smouldering'—glowing red in the breeze. The trees which had made beautiful the cattle market in the southern part of the torvu- had been sawn off short near their stumps, and were lying there as they fell. I do not know A\ - hat avus the motive of this —whether to open the square to aeroplane observation or sheer do.structiveuess.

A COUNTRY ROAD. We left B&paume behind us, and went Straight out along the Bougnatrc Road. The car spun between banks of green grass along a good even road as roads go in these parts. After our endless trudgings along interminable duckboards during the past winter over miles upon miles of mud and waterfill- I ed pet holes, it was like breaking suddenly into another world. We scuttled past the lines of tangled wire where the enemy had been on Saturday after we took Bapaume. Every here and there in the roadside bank was a square yard or so of digging with newlyvbrokcn earth around it. It was the mouth of a dug-out which the enemy had blown down or stripped of its timber before he left it. The slimy yellow clay of the roof had collapsed inside, and was lapping over the stair. The road became suddenly worse. On the left were the marks of traffic and trodden mud.. The Germans had clearly had one of their supply dumps or depots of engineering stores here quite lately. But they had cleared everything as clean as a dog lisks a plate. The road swerved into Beugnatre, and just at the village entrance there stared at us in tHo middle of the road a big, newly blown crater. There ->-0 possibility of getting round it. and so the car was left there, and we walked on through the village. THE LITTLE HAMLET. It was a poor little hamlet of a ’ace at its best—Beugnatre— a dozen ■ so of tiny agricultural cottages; om airsized farm; and the attendant f usy plaster* walled barns. The German had blown it to runis with absolute tornplofp *. The cottages had collapsed nprv thru selves with the Mowing up of their and lay there—what re--

mained of them—flat on the ground. Not a. single house that avc could see Avas left. The furniture must have disappeared long ago to furnish German camps in the neighbourhood. Those aa t lio had been through Bapaume more thoroughly than I told me that the furniture there had in some cases been piljed inside the houses Avith tar poured over it in order to help the place to burn. The German dugouts always did differ from British dugouts in this respect, that they are furnished Avith chairs, curtains, table cloths, stoves, looking glasses from the nearest villages, AA-hereas the furniture of a British dugout is improvised AvoodAA'ork such as engineers or pioneers put together for them.

THE “PEEPAEED” BATTLEGEO UND.

Here again for some reason I could not fathom, the Germans had sawn oif trunks low down and the trees lay side by side on the' field beside the road. Sometimes it was on one side of the road that they had been felled, sometimes on the other, but rarely on both sides. The Germans say that they 'have been preparing the' whole country into a favourable battleground as they retire, and one must suppose that these are some of their preparations. But their meaning is difficult to sec. At the top of the gentle rise we came upon the fourth German line. It was a double lino of boldly planned wide trenches with great square massive traverses, very regular as are all German trenches. They were not very deep trnehes, and we notied no dugouts in them. The second trench was 60 or 70 j'ards behind the first, and there was a double belt of wire in front of each of them. The line wandered away to left and right across the country, a monument of labour gone to waste—but which might have been the salva, tion of the German army in certain eventualities. The German assuredly, leaves very little to chance.

As we reached the hilltop to the right of the road, over the crest appeared the rooftops of two more villages. The purple slates seemed to be intact upon a good many of them — but as they had been shelled with fairly big shells that morning and were shelled again yesterday, their immunity will not last very long. It seemed that the German had been bustled out of this part of the country some days before he calculated on leaving it. THE GERMANS ON THE HILL. Our troops were at the top of their bent. Ou a hill on one side of us was a sunken road—there ovas a patrol of Light Horse and a post of infantry somewhere thereabouts which had been blazing at the Germans whom a couple of our field guns bolted from a copse near by. A battery of German “pip squeaks’-’ was somewhere in the country ahead banging occasional salvoes m to what it considered likely corners in the open landscape Far ahead on the summit of a grey hill four miles away, we could sec through our glasses throe or four figures moving on the skyline; on this side of them up the distant, hillside crept lines of troops. The lines scorned to form into bodies of about 50 men each in close column of route as they went. It was part -of the German rearguard. . .o. U