WORLD’S BATTLE RAGING.

Taihape Daily Times, 14 September 1918, Page 5

WORLD ’S BATTLE RAGING.

ATTACK ON WOTAN LINE. MAN-TO-MAN STRUGGLE LONDON, September 3. Mr Beach Thomas, correspondent of the Daily Mail, says: The attack on the Wotan line is a world’s battle, split into 1000 fragments. Although pierced, and its five successive ditches captured, we have only penetrated its outer defences, and the enemy is still defending the line to a great depth. Wo have seized the ridge along which the line is dug, and are looking across a narrow valley to a second ridge, where the Germans arc massing every available man. We have stormed the strongest earth and wire fortress in history, and have commenced a great battle, in which the enemy is forced to struggle man to man, despite his utmost ingenuity to avoid such a conflict.

In a later message, Mr Thomas describes the subsequent advance through the breach as so impetuous and irresistible that prisoners were captured screaming and quaking with fear, their appearance suggesting that the enemy is badly short of manpower. Many were young, small,, weak green troops, oddly dressed, with selfmade paper puttees. This was their first experience in actual fighting, having been hurriedly thrown in to stop the breach. The number of prisoners seems to be legion and they arc coming in everywhere. The motor machine-guns’ dash on the Nord Canal was a most wonderful feat. They traversed the Arras-Cam-brai road, which was a coridor of death heaving aud smoking beneath the shellfire, as though the earth was in eruption. The motors careered along at such a speed that .they passed the shells, and then the doubled and trebled defences on both sides of the road and reached the canal where they held up the German reinforcements

Mr Pereival Phillips, correspondent of the Daily Express says that fierce fighting continues among the villages west of Cambrai, the enemy making a supreme effort to hold up General Horne’s troops, and throwing in every scrap of available material. -Divisions are bunched together indiscriminately tired and fresh infantry, dismounted cavalry, pioneers, and headquarters clerks, fighting with the energy of

despair. Elsewhere the German war machine shows signs of lack of discipline and determination.

To what straits the enemy is reduced may be judged by the condition of the Second Guards ’ Reserve Division, which was thrown in during the fighting. It had already suffered so heavily that its fighting strength was barely 1000 men, one battalion consisting of a single officer and 35 other ranks. The prisoners are dejected, but bitterness and arrogance arc almost entirely .absent.

German fighting aeroplanes arc almost wholly devoting themselves to .anti-tank work, particularly at night time, when they constantly cut off their, engines in order to detect ' the grinding of tractors, after which they drop brilliant parachute lights to see where to bomb.