THE BRITISH GUNNERS.

Taihape Daily Times, 18 December 1917, Page 7

THE BRITISH GUNNERS.

MARVELLOUS ENDURANCE AND courage. • UNCEASING toil. Writing to the “Daily Chronicle” from the War Correspondents’ Headquarters, Mr Philip Gibbs pays a high tribute to the work of the British gunners. I marvelled, he says, at the gunners who have gone on so long—so long through the days and nights—feeding those monsters. The infantry have had a hard tlme_ It is they who light with flesh and blood against the machinery of slaughter w3ich is set against them. It is they who go out across the fields on thaT"wild adventure into the unknown. But the gunners standing by the heavies and the ' 18-pounders in the sodden fields with piles of shells about them and great dumps near by, have no easy, pleasant time. On the morning of the last battle I saw the enemy’s shells" searching for them, flinging up earth about their batteries, ploughing deep holes on either side of them. They worked in the close neighbourhood of death, and at any moment between one round and another a battery and its gun teams might be blown up by one of those howling beasts whicEPcieems to gather strength and ferocity at the end of their flight before the final roar of destruction. Now and again a lucky shell of the enemy’s get an ammunition dump, and a great torch rises to the dark sky and in its flames there are wild explosions as the shells are touched off. But the gunners go on with their work in all the tumult of their own batteries, deafening and ear-splitting, and nerve-destroying, and our young gunner officers, muddy, unshaven, unwashed, with sleep-drawn eyes pace up and down the line of guns, saying, “Are you ready, number one?” Number one, fire,” with no sign of the strain that keeps them on the rack when a big battle is in "progress’. A TRYING ORDEAL. For them the battle lasts longer than for the infantry. It begins before the infantry advances; it lulls a little, and then breaks out into new fury when the German counter-at-tacks begin. It does not end when the S.O.S. signals have been answered by hours of bombardment but goes on again to keep German roads under fire, to smother their back areas, to batter their gun positions. So when the German guns were getting back behind thePasschendaele, hauled back out of the mud to take up new emplacements from W’hich they can pour explosives on the ground we have daptured, our gunners could not rest, but made his work hideous for the enemy, and followed his guns along their tracks. The British gunners, in the frightful battles, have worked with a courage and endurance to the limit of human nature, and the infantry are the first to praise them and to marvel at them. The infantry go" marching In' fcfce rain a nd trudging in the mud, and stumbling over the ~~ water-logged craters, and out on the battlefield stand knee-deep in pools and bogs that have been made by shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the Flemish brooks like the Hannebeek and the Strombeke and Reutelbeke, and by the heavy downpour on the up-hea'vecl earth.