A WAR OF MACHINES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 145, 13 November 1914, Page 7

A WAR OF MACHINES.

AUTOMATIC DKATII DEALERS. SCFFOCATIXfi SHELL FUMES. (By 11. Hamilton Fyi'e, Daily Mail Special Correspondent.) "This is not a war of men. It is a war of machines."

A wounded olliccr was speaking, and speaking bitterly, for he bad seen more than half the battalion which lie commanded swept down, as the tall grass falls to the mower's scythe, by the terrible mitrailleuse.

'"There is an appalling soullcssness about it," he went on. "It is savagely inhuman. Men turn handles and deatli 'flies out 'in large bundles'" (I translate literally to give the phrase its full effect). '"What this battle has been —it is all really one battle, the Marne and the Aisne—no one can even conceive who has not seen the battlefield. Men could never kill one another by heaps, by hecatombs. They would sicken at such wholesale .slaughter. They would cry out, 'We are soldiers, not butchers. A battlefield should not be an abattoir.' Only machines ingeniously constructed to destroy men as locusts have to he destroyed when they sweep over a fertile land, only automatic death-dealers without heart or pity or remorse could carpet the earth with dead in this frightful way." That last phrase is surely Kipling's. Writing in a wayside railway station on an empty packing-case, I cannot turn to a shelf and look up "Kitchener's School," where I think I could find it. But in any case the. officer cliose exactly the same words. And almost everyone I talked with in that train of wounded crawling down to the south spoke in the same horrified way. One tall cuirassier told how, after charging a mass of German infantry through and back and then through and back again, there was "a wall,"but, yes, MOMicur, truly a wall of corpses, so that we had to jump our horses to get I clear."

Another man, a foot chasseur, described a beetroot field where the Germans lay dead, "hundreds of them, just as if they had been struck by lightning. That is how our 'soixante-quinze' kills like 'le bon Dieu' when he is angry and flashes his wrath in the sky—zut, dead where vou stand!"

"ROSALIE'S" GRIOAT WORK. The "soixante-quinze" is, of course, the famous French 75-millimetre (roughly three-inch) gun, of which the soldiers all speak with affection. They have strange wavs. Their artillery is alive to them l . Tlicy talk of it with a personal feeling of gratitude and admiration. The bayonets, too, they have personified. One of the wounded Sapliis spoke of a hand-to-hand fight (these have been rare) in which "Rosalie" had done great work.

"Rosalie," he explained, "that is how we call our 'anno blanche.' She was christened so one evening as we marched back after using her to good elVect. The steel shone rosy with bloodstains in die light of the 'couohant' (the setting sun). Rosalie, we call her" (he patted his long, thin bayonet affectionately), "Rosalie, the terror of the 'Bodies.'" Rut the number that "Rosalie" accounts for is very small against the masses who are "automatically" destroyed. On the German side it is the mitrailleuse, the 'Maxim gun, which dues most damage; on the French side, the "soixante-quinze." Several doctors told me that the wounds of the Germans arc for the most part far more disastrous than those of the French and English soldiers.

I "The French sheila burst with terrific | effect. They tear legs and arms to pieces. If they wound head or stomach, all is over. Tt is quite true, too'' (this in answer to a query of mine), "that many meji are fount! (lead without anv wound on them. We find thera, as we fro over the fields of battle, kneeling or sitting in trendies in natural attitudes just as if they were still alive, just as tliev knelt or sat when the. shell hurst, and in an instant suffocated them with its melinite fumes. "Ah! the battlefield of the Marnn! Never has any war seen anything approaching it in horror. The only cqjisolation is that the German dead are far far more numerous than ours. But even so, even though they are our enemies, and barbarous enemies, how can one reconcile such sights with civilisation, with Christianity? If these bodie« so thickly strewn were, bodies of animals we would feel sorry. But men, monsieur, men! Never has the like been seen since the world began." That sounds lik;c exaggeration. Some of you may incline to think it not far removed WcWia V...

j tiio-ic of the Balkan War, in which losses . ■ reckoned iiji to iigures then 11)1I 1 :' ,'I of. A lied Cru.is nurse speaKs — ii i-h-ver, businesslike frenchwoman who ha.- been picked out for several jobs iv-juiring special qualities of levcl-head-e:l'icss: "Ali'reux!'' (fearful) she says: "Afi'reiix, isirren;:!' 1 ami shuts her eyes tight lor ;i moment in blot oiii, tiie .riyhts ;iat ,': !■;!;[■ i' - brings before the'.il. ; "Think of tiie numbers -two mil Kens. I

iin't has lieVi r be-i> etjimlied. Think i>f lee precision of the inachim'i'V i';:r killing! And the number of machines! And iin 10hi11 of ammunition which the}' use! ('!crininiy must be one ui-l; hospital. Franee is to be Ihe same."

1 have seen that for myself. T have just travelled ' i nun tiie Athuitie coast right up through, the eentre of Trance, and wounded are everywhere. Alreadv beds are becoming scarce, though fortunately there are so many slightly, that IS cleanly, injured that they recover quickly and make room for newcomers. But it brings home the immensity of the struggle to see every available" school, institution and ; ':Mie hall turned into a hospital, as well as every big railway j Station and numberless private houses, and then to remember that in Germany it is far worse.

Almost everywhere then 1 :ire scattered among the French a few i\'ngli ,h wonnded. This nurse in tiie train said she had tiie in in one hospital in alternate beds, "jney make triemls at once and insist on changing caps.'' she said, laughing. "They exchange everything. J have even seen a Highlander change his petticoathow do you call it?—his kilt, for a pair of red trousers. The h;ng ionnicYs astonish your soldiers. Tiu-y say, 'We did not know Prance was so big.''

BUAVJ? K.YGUSH XURSFS. "The bravery of your Knglisli muses is liiagiiilk-ciit. Tlicy go into tl'.e liring line \vithout fear, and attend to the wounded with bullets and shells falling all roiiud tliiin. Two were killed ill this way, attending to Herman wounded — think of that! Hut not so bad as the i'l'eneh ductal' 1 know who was actually killed by the Herman whose wound he went to bind up." "Is it true,'' 1 asked, 'that the Herman wounded and prisoners are all luingrv?" (X bad my doubts about the stories that they had been reduced to wolfing raw beetroots with lumps of earth sticking to it, and even to eating hay.) "it is, so far as my experience goes," she answered. "Something must have gone, wrong with their supply trains. '1 In; lirst tiling tiie wounded ask us for is 'something to eat.' .Many of tliem have told us that they are lucky to have been picked up by tiie French, since in

iniijiy places the (iei'inuns have kille their own wounded. It sounds unlike ly,'' she went on, swing I. looked incredulous, "lmt ivlio can toll? They say so themselves."

"liut what ignorant boors compared to our soldiers, and to yours also! Tlioy ha\e no education. It is no wonder tl'py commit atrocities, when they are encouraged by their more brutal officers. They arc clods, more like animals than men."

The stories of the long battle which tile, men told—wearing German helmets or fur hats many of them; nursing their wounded leet, or stroking arms which throbbed with fever, or resting bandaged heads against carriage windows—were bewildering in their garrulous abundance of detail. Out of them all one or two stand out.

1 here is a story of a motor-car convoy which charged a couple of troops of German dragoons. Out of a wood the troopers rode and began firing on the cars, summoning them to stop. The driver of the iirst—he seems to have taken the direction of the fight—opened out full speed, and before the dragoons realised it the cars were going through them at about 50 miles an hour.

There was a treaicndous bumping about, many, were unhorsed, several horses ran away, two or three poor brutes had their legs broken. Fortunately not one fell before the leading car, or the charge would have been stopped. As they charged the motor-ear men Jired, but did not do great damage. It was a great thing, though, to get clear away.

Another tale with a serio-comic flavour to it is the tale of fu*e German infantrymen who lost their regiment in a rapid retreat from a position and hid under haycocks. The pursuing French fell over one of them. He instantly threw up his hands and then began to talk volubly in German, of which the French could not understand a word. ITe pointed to the haycocks, though, ar i that gave a sergeant some idea of what he meant, lie ordered his men to aim at the haycocks, and went towards thorn himself with a revolver. Then, "just like a scene in a play," out crawled the other four Germans and surrendered.

, KXjEMV DIFKJCDLT TO SKK

Tlie difficulty of seeing the enemy is what almost all the wounded insist upon. Ihat adds to the inhumanity of this war of machines. Hundreds, even thousands, of men have been killed without setting eves on the troops opposed to them.

And another tiling. All attribute-the greatest "bag" to the mitrailleuse. A very sensible British infantryman with a millet through his band said' the German gunners' aim was good (contrary to the French belief), but that their shells often did not explode. "When they do" no said, they spit out all kinds of mcrelmndise—din. holts among tlier things." 1 lie German howitzer, of which so much was expected before the war, did not, according to this man, compare with the British. "They don't seem to be able to Handle it at all against aeroplanes. Ours get them time after time. One shot to give warning, then another 'trial bull,' then Xo. 3, and up goes the number, down comes the "plane. But it's the Maxims that do the most damage." Clearly our new Army, which is bein" trained now, should he very largely a Marim-gnn force. Xot oniv do these drive holes into the ranks, but thwy give courage and confidence to the troops upon whose side they are.

Our men are better than Germans General French says so. Wu know it. Hut this is not a war of men. It is a war of machines. Our machines must be at least as good as theirs and not less numerous.

Afterwards we must set about making slaughter on this vast scale impossible, but now our business is killing'. We must have plenty of the best killing machines.