MONTH OF BATTLES.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 5 July 1917, Page 3

MONTH OF BATTLES.

MANY HEROIC DEEDS. DETERMINATION OF THE MEN. •' Writing of the first month of the --"battle of Arras” Mr. Philip Gibbs says that for both sides the struggle has been a fiery ordeal, in which a great sum of human life has been burnt and blasted. On the great day of April 9 our losses were very light, as losses must be -counted nowadays, and in comparison with our great gains. The enemy's losses were on that day huge in prisoners, in killed, and wounded, in guns, and in all the materials of war. Since then, after hours, and even days, of panic, lest our tide of men should break all barriers and overwhelm his Hindenburg line, the enemy has been able to rally, to rush up great reserves, and to replace his captured and battered guns by many new batteries. That has saved the Hindenburg line, for a time at least, but has not reduced his daily toll of life and limb. To pretend that our own men have escaped scot-free would be a silly lie. The casualty lists tell how many we have lost. For all our men it has been, and will be yet, hard, fierce fighting against a desperate and resolute enemy, supported by violent gunfire, and by what is worse than high explosives —an incessant sweep of mach-ine-gun bullets. Without knowing that, one cannot understand the meaning of this battle nor the spirit of our men. It is a spirit quite unconquerable, very grim, and in many eases admitting neither defeat nor retreat, whatever the odds against tho, may be. I know many cases lately when men of ours have ignored all orders to retire and held out in small parties when part of our line has fallen back in the ebb and flow of the battles. At Guemappe dozens of Scottish soldiers held isolated posts like this. At Gavrcllc English soldiers fought by the windmill and suffered hcrocially rather than surrender. All through our army, whatever the breed of the men —and they came of till our British stocks —our soldiers show this same grim resolution to finish the job, as they call it, and have done with it. STEELED AGAINST TERROR.

In this battle of Arras there are individual acts- of courage incredible almost in human nature, but what to me is more amazing is the general stolidity of all of the, this common valour of shopboys and clerks and farmers’ lads and factory hands. To say they are always without fear would be ridiculous. They are often very much afraid, as all men must be when high explosives come out of the blue sky with frightful noises for abominable slaughter. But these lads are, by some magic, steeled against ordinary ness and against imaginative terror.' Scenes of the battlefield, dead bodies that lie about, noises of the sky and thunderclaps of bursting shells, arc no longer the abnormal things of life, but the normal and our men pass through them and live in them and become hardened to them.

Even the heroic act is no longer extraordinary, There are so many heroic acts, that military medals and mffflhry crosses are hard earned, though scattered wide in all divisions. Each one of them might have been a Victoria Cross in earlier wars. A Scottish divisn fighting in this battle of Arras has recorded a number of acts of special valour among its men which would fill a big book if told in detail, and our boys from English counties and our London men have done as well. It was a Scottish sergeant some days ago who saw a great bomb fall 10 yards from his mortar owing to a faulty cartridge, and had just a few seconds to decide between life and death. He sprang at the live bomb, unscrewed the burning fuse, and hurled it away just before it exploded, so saving, beyond a doubt, the lives of his -whole detachment. SPLENDID DEEDS OF COURAGE. On the first day of the battle of Arras one of our batteries was unde* the fire of a gas-shell barrage for 35 minutes. Two guns and several men wore knocked out, but officer steadied his other men, and, although twice thrown down and wounded, kept four guns an action. Although kjit five times, a sergeant of a Highland regiment continued to lead his men against the enemy’s lines and a little Highland officer in the same action led his boys <to two objjectitves, went from point to point over open ground under incessant machine-gun fire, and, with a small party of his men, rushed one of the machine-guns and olapitured the team. On the same day a medical officer’s orderly behaved with most splendid courage, dressing and bringing in wounded under fire until a shell burst close, killed the doctor and two assistants, and wounded the orderly. But this man did not leave his work even then till he fainted and* fell. All through tilts month-long battle our gunners, infantry, stretcherbearers, and transport men have worked in this way on ground searched by shrapnel, machine-gun bullets, and heavy shell, not only in the. front line but far behind the lines. Runners go down with messages to battalion headquarters until at last they are hit or buried in shell-craters Gunners work

their batteries on forward slopes a* ar 95- bywlm fera orzbithe direct targets of hostile guns. It was an officer’s cook the other day, a man already five times “over the bags,” who went over the parapet and out found and bandaged a badly-wounded officer and brought him back. These arc a few individual acts. Give me time and I could tell hundreds of them, yet never toll all that have been done in these four weeks of the battle of Arras by English, Scots, Irish Canadians, and Australians in that barren wildernless which ijs the battlefield from Loos to St. Quentin, where there is never a silence of guns nor safety for several miles deep behind the lines, nor any comfort for man or beast, nor any peace.