THE LINE IN FLANDERS.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 5 October 1917, Page 6

THE LINE IN FLANDERS.

COUNTRY EAST OF YPRES.

FLOODS 'AND SAND DUNES,

The country east of Yprcs over which the British infantry has been fighting is described by a correspondent of the Morning Post as a wilderness of lagoons, salt marshes, and flat farm land as dreary and as difficult of access as the Fen country, and hardly better adapted for hard fighting, or the passage of heavy guns. The armies embedded here for nearly three years thrust their Banks seaward from the salient of Tpres through flat, sodden fields, choked with dank grass and stagnant water, and meagrely served by rough roads, to the above Nieuport, where the last soldier and last marine watched each other within reach of the rising tide.

Around Ypres our infantry sat in a saucer, with the German trenches planted on its lip. The enemy had the better ground. When he drove down from Zonnebeke on waves of poison gas, in the second great struggle for Ypres, the tightening of the salient gave him a firmer grip, but he could not strike the final successful blow and take the town.

The enemy defences ran through the cellars of Hooge and Verlorenhoek, and slightly in front, of patches of mutilated forest, behind which were a few slight spurs of shell-ridden ground —mere shoulders of earth that would hardly arrest the eye or be of much value save on such a naked plain The upper tip of the salient rested on the Yser Canal and the German trenches found the east bank at its junction with the Langemarck Road, a few hundred yards bo!o;w Boesinghe. / THE AREA OF MARSHES. Thence to the sea was the strangest phase of stationary warfare to be found anywhere amng the great ■western fortress between Switzerland and the Channel. A treacherous no man’s land of varying width lay between the opposing barriers, for the greater part of its length, —a swamp that swallowed men and horses and gripped fast the German whenever he tric’d to reach the drier road to Calais. Held by this morass, widened and made more formidable by the deliberate release of pent-up the enemy took the wandering Yser for his main bulwark from Boesinghe to the coast. He follov/ed this derelict canal for ncar.y five mi'ms above the sa.iont to the i desolate flats at Erie Grachten, near Noordschoote. There, baffled by the marshes, he turned eastward into firmer ground along the high road to the ruins of Dixmude, which he enveloped above that hardly-w r on bridge-head the German line slipped again into the snake-like folds of the Yser. which carried it deviously across other canal systems around the site of Lombartzyde to Westende —once a summer pleasure resort of gaudy villas, now a dust-heap among the dunes ENEMIES’ CONCRETE SHELTERS. The allies” front, vis-a-vis of the Invader for a little distance above Ypres, swung west of Dixmude to the nearly straight line of the Nieuport railway, leaving it on the coastside of Ramscapelle to become an irregular salient around Nieuport and its mesh of great canals. Around and above Dixmude was the inundated region. Only the narrow strip between Nieuport-Ostend Canal and the beach could be counted dry ground —and that was yielding Artificial lakes of brackish water confronted us near Dixmude—a greater one, the Noorland Polder, east of Nieuport, its boundaries divided between the opposing outposts, and the farms abutting it 1 lost in lesser ponds and pools of fluctuating depth. In the Ypres salient the enemy could keep his defences fairly dry, but he could not dig deep into the danvp. earth. He built concrete shelters in profusion, but they were more vulnerable than the spacious subterranean caves of Arras and the Somme. He was incessantly shoring up and relining, his fire trenches and communications, and baling them in flood-time and wedging fast his loosened wire Constant effort was necessary in order to keep them tenable. Higher up the situation was more difficult. At-some places between Erie Grachten and the dunes he could not hug the Yser —the swamp defeated his engineers and set them building breastworks further back — but, generally speaking, the canal was his frontier. The harder ground between the salient and Dixmude was overlaid with a deep layer of trenches, and nets of wire, for this was one of the gates to invaded Belgium; above Dixmude he stuck little forts. on patches of semi-dry soil in the vague No-man’s Land.