A GIRL IN THE FIRING LINE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 154, 25 November 1914, Page 7

A GIRL IN THE FIRING LINE.

ADVANTAGE OF BEING SMALL. (By Miss F. Tennyson Jesse, in the Daily Mail.) For the first time I have had the luck to achieve the forbidden feat of getting into the firing line. For days the Germans and Belgians had been fighting all round Termonde to away beyond Malines, a battle some forty or fifty miles in length. Alost was one of the chief points of contact, and it was part of the successful, though soon reversed, attempt to win it back that I had the good fortune to see the crack Belgian regiments—the' Guides and the Lanciers —go into action, in fact to go with tliem. An American correspondent with the necessary passes agreed to give me a lift as far as the authorities would allow me to go. As we came to the village where the general had his headquarters, and where regiments of Guides in their cherrycolor and green, and of Lancers in their blue and gold, were awaiting the order to advance. jSere, apparently, was the finish .as far as I was concerned, f<?r on reaching the far end of the village, a verp polite colonel regretted to inform me that he had orders not to let me pass. So I had to stay behind while the other party went on. It was an exquisite day on which to be alive with a clear, hard blue sky that paled to whiteness towards the flat horizon; on either side of the intermingle roadway the poplars stood ranked, ey trunk after grey trunk, and the ..nlight flickering through their foliage made a pattern of dappled shadow over the men and horses resting beneath. The village itself was bare and mean, nothing but a fringe of half a dozen onestorey cottages, but it was superbly decorated by the glint of lances, the gloss of the horses' flanks, the gold and cherry and green and blue of the uniforms. The men were mostly fine-look-ing,, with light eyes and keen-edged faces under the black fur of their busbies. They stood about in little groups and chatted to eacli other and to me, and I found them most courteous and considerate. After taking some photographs and drinking a glass of milk, I managed to slip out of the village and on up the road to where the crack-crack of rifle-firing told of the fight. This was not a difficult feat, as I was told that, though I could not be given permission .to pass, yet 1 was so small that if I just strolled along on the other side of the road they (the officers) would simply not be able to sec me.

AMAZED SENTRIES. So I walked about a couple of kilometres' up into' the fight, but before I reached it I met a motor-cycle scout tearing down, and a few minutes later, with a clatter of hoofs and a jingle of accoutrements, all four regiments rode past, saluting as they went, and followed by the artillery that thundered with grey iron wheels over the cobbles. So I came to the village of Erpe, witli no further incident than that a couple of officers wheeled their horses to tell me the bullets were flying further up the road, but they wished me luck, as I did them, and allowed me to continue. At Erpe I nearly got into trouble, since I had very idiotically forgotten to take my papers out of the car, but while the sentries were still discussing among themselves whether they should ask me for any I walked on, and in their amazement at seeing me there at all they did nothing. At the end of the village I came on the others, oil the car and on the fight. The Belgians had just driven the enemy back, and on a field by the road's edge lay the Germans, with their faces shot away—what had been men now a mere huddle of grey on the brown enrth by I the newly-turned trench. Apart from the pitifulness of that sight the whole affair was extraordinarily unlike what one reads in books. The chief note was the scattered air of the thing, the casual grouping of men, here and there someone riding off across the fields to reconnoitre, the peasants coming out of their cottages to see the dead soldiers, though the bullets were clipping the leaves oil ■the branches just above our heads as wc stood there. The peasants were soon hustled back again—indeed, the whole affair suddenly took on a hustling, confused quality—the Americans and one or two officers coming up and saying we were all in the direct line of fire, that fact and that the sun had gone in and a groynes blurred everything, the dropping of the shot leaves aiid twigs about one, or the chipping of a stone into sudden whiteness near one's feet—all these things gave an odd feeling of being in a j dream.

BULLETS LIKE INVISIBLE INSECTS. Odd, too, was the queer little plaintive noise made bv the bullets, rather like a sobbing whine. They went sighing beside one, and the sound of their going was as clear as though someone had given a little moan or a bee had gone twanging past, and yet one could not see the things themselves. It was only a3 though the air were stinging with invisible insects. This probably accounts for the unalarining nature or rifle, fire as compared with shells or shrapnel. You simplv, in the former case, do not feel under fire, at all. I was put into a doorway, others took cover behind trees or in the ditch; then the order to retreat was given and I was hustled into the car and told to lie as Hat as possible. We all retreated once more after a while to the stretch of road the other side of Erpe, and there, over to the right, as one looked back towards the village, the artillery got into action, keeping it up steadily, so that it soon became monotonous, like an orchestra at dinner. ■ To the left, from the village of Dcde, whose roofs showed red. beside some dark patches of woods, all the peasants streamed towards us over the bright fields. One is used nowadays in Belgium to this perpetual procession, always going past in profile, bundle on back, children on arm, and helpless old folk in wheelbarrows —an endless frieze of bowed figures dark against the clear autumn sky. Yet every lime the misery and futility and unnecessary cruelty of it strike at the mind more deeply.

PRETTY CAVALRY CHARGE. After an hour or so, there occurred one of the prettiest sights possible, and one rather rare in modern warfare —a cavalry charge across the fields to where the enemy ay ere thought to lie concealed beyond the woods. The Landers had been reconnoitring there, and every now and then the tips of their lances would catcli the evening sun and gleam like tliin flames against the dark foliage; now tlie Guides jumped their horses over the ditch and formed up in t.tiß field a.r--' *l'" aniLikit-mim,