War NEWS

Taihape Daily Times, 25 February 1918, Page 6

War NEWS

LINE NEAR THE MENIN ROAD

BATTLEFIELD IN WINTER

BELGIUM, December 8,

After the Passchendaele fighting the New Zealanders spent three peaceful weeks in training and recuperating. Recently they came again into the line not far from Ypres. They passed through the famous ancient city, still strangely fascinating with its ruined houses and the shattered walls and towers of its cathedral and its Cloth Hall, and for some distance along the Menin Eoad. On every side are names that will remain for ever famous in the •war history of this generation. Zillebeke, St. Eloi, Hill 60, B'ecelaere, Sanctuary Wood, and the Chateau de ,1a Hooge are among them.

It was the dawn of a morning when we went through Ypres on the way to our front-line trenches. Not far beyond the spot where we had to leave our car we entered upon a scene of desolation such as it is difficult to picture or imagine. On either side of the broad road the fretted earth had been torn again and yet again by German and by British shellfire Waves of battle had ebbed and flowed about a land that but a few short years ago had held smiling hamlets and green fields and woods. Now over thousands of acres the trees and the grass and the houses had been wiped away. There were, it is true, a few rubble heaps of reddish brown brick denoting where houses had stood, and there were -the branchless land broken trunks of trees that told where woods had been, but nowhere any grass. The earth was bare and brown.

THE EOAD TO THE FRONT,

The shell craters are rim to rim over square miles' of countryside. This morning the ground was frozen hard and the ico was an inch thick on all the ponds. Men had to break through with an axe or some stout stake to get water. Since the frost other shells had burst, scattering the ice on the road and the frozen clay. And then the water had frozen once more. On either side of the road was the debris of furious war—broken waggons and gun-limbers, barbod'-tvirc*, unexploded shells, and dead horses with mouths agape. All were frozen into the brown soil, immovable. It was though such a scene that our men marched One more to (he front, but one now passed it by without a shudder, for custom has staled the infinite variety of its horror. Across the shell-torn land before the frost had come, it was difficult to walk in the sticky mud, but now one could cut off corners and walk ■with case—so hard w r as the frozen ground. Rising gradually we approached the great mound or “butte” where the enemy in his underground, stoutlytimbered warren had withstood our heaviest shelling. The German gunners shelled it persistently. From the Butte there is a wonderful view of the country we had conquered, and of the positions we have still to conquer, Inside the tunnels of the butte, when a battle is raging, the noise of the artillery is like the continual dull roar of the waves as heard in some seaside cave. We have passed a strong line of trench and wire, blown out of all semblance of a line by our own artillery. We have noted the strong square blockhouses and pill-boxes’ that sheltered the German machine guns and their gunners, and again we wonder at the feat of British arms that has crowed this ridge with victory.

WORK OF THE SNIPERS. Presently we are in the front line trench. It, too, is narrow and sandy and dry. As yet it is not rivetted. At times the enemy sends a few shells to it acros the waste of No Mon’s Land, and at night he mixes his shelling with poison gas. In the trench our snipers were constantly on the outlook In their own language they got the Boche snipers down. With fneir boots swathed in sandbag wrappings, to keep their feet warm, they looked like Shackletons in the South Polar regions Some others were sleeping in little dug-outs in the comparatively dry sandy soil, with their feet protruding into the trench through the sacking doorway. The Germans were quite close and had been putting out wire in the night time on the edge of what had been a wood. Our men sometimes got a glimpse of them in parties of twos and threes, and then the rifles of the snipers rang out The divisional general with whom I made the trip was busy all this time studying the situation. He alcc’s to see for himself, for that way success lies.] In the course of the morning we obtained extended views far into the enemy’s terrain. On the horizon on the left front there loomed up a ridge that will not be easily taken. We saw Moorslede, nndestroyed,) amidst it£ trees, the broken buildings at Gheluvelt and its ridge; and, fronting it, Poldorhoek Chateau, near which bravo men of the New Zealand Division have fallen.