THE GERMAN PILL BOXES.

Taihape Daily Times, 11 December 1917, Page 3

THE GERMAN PILL BOXES.

One satisfactory feature of the recent fighting has been the' relative failure of the enemy's new defensive measures. We had heard a great deal about the effectiveness of th,e famous pill boxes which the Germans had substituted on the Flanders front for the old trench system of warfare. The terrain here lies so low that deep dug-outs of the kind pith which wo became familiar on the Somme front are an impossibility. Aerial reconnaisance too, has been perfected to such an extent that trench systems are now very speedily blotted out of existence by artillery fire. The Germans had to devise some new methods, therefore of holding up our advance. They hit upon the idea of these small concrete forts —tiny stell-cased contrivances capable of accommodating the handful of men necessary for working the ma-chine-guns with which they are plentifully armed. To those new methods of our own, with results which have gone some way to reassure those who drew the most gloomy pictures of the deadly effectiveness of the pillboxes. This is not the only comforting lesson wo are able to draw from the fighting which has taken place since Sir Douglas Haig resumed the offensive on a big scale. In this column at least no attempt, has ever been made to belittle the bravery of the German soldier. To give him his due, he is a good fighter. But it is significant, to say the least, that such a large proportion of raw lads should have been captured amongst our last batch of prisoners. Wo have raw lads in our own army. “But we do not put them by choice in positions where they are likely to find themselves in the hottest part of the fight. We let them get seasoned before we do that. If we ever came to change his practice it will be from necessity, and not from choice. And we shall probably not be wrong in assuming that it is necessity which drives the Germans to this expedient. If that is so, it throws an illuminating light on the enemy’s dwindling military strength.