"A WAD OF HEATH."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 179, 7 January 1915, Page 7

"A WAD OF HEATH."

| HORRIFYING SIGHTS. JHE ATTACKS ON YPRES. Wc hear of tho heroism of war, and; our soldierß, as gay as ever, give tl>c[ fighting its salt of humor, writes \\. Beach-Thomas in the Daily Mail, under date, November 15. Between the fine deeds and merry words the horrors are in part omitted. But it is not well to forget that war is war. If we do \r» certainly shall know what tli» fighting of the past fortnight has been on the terrible battlefields of Ypres. What men have here endured to suffer those it home must endure to hear. The greatest of our recent successes has been tho clearing of the enemy out of the woods, many of thenl of young trees and scrub, north of Ypres. They were doggedly held for a long time and persistently attacked. This way and that way the fight swayed, till a final hour when two bodies of our infantry advancing from different angles, and fighting with the bayonet, swept through and killed every man who held Ms ground. When the work was over, the men, after the established custom of this w*r, turned to the task of digging ttemselves in at selected pl»ecs. The first rough trenches zigzagged in the usual manner like battlement and embrasure. Tho work took some two hours, and the men were ablo to rest in temporary security. When night fell, some engineers who had been resting further back, during the day, and had not joined in the attack, were sent for to fix barbed wire and help u 9 to turn these rough trenches into living-places; to drain the ,i with a sunk Una oi stones, to cut the two steps and slope the sidessteep at the back, more sloping in front. One of these engineers—a man whose pluckv services had procured him promotion, who had seen moving sights enough to harden any sensibility stopped as he began to enter the wood under .such a sense of horror as paralysed Ins minds and limbs. He could not go forward or back. The trees were filled with tho strange light of winter even ings, and wherever he looked he saw the faces and forms in number multitudinous. The ground was strewn, almost heaped, with forms, in every at titude, each twisted into horrible grotesqueness by the waninc light. When the wind wailing through the branches brought down one of the relic leaves of a "pestilence stricken multitude," which brushed against his elotlies like, a great moth, he trembled like * frightened child; at last', when from the haunted shadows a thin voice called for water, his spirit was quite daunted, and power of movement quite abandoned him Ho could not move. When, later, free of the wood, he vas busy at tho dangerous game, of ftxmjj the entanglement of wire before the tifilches, he felt in a haven of siuery. (This is no decorated picture, but the bare experience of an unsentsuei.tal Svi'dier promoted for nerve in face of is a thing almost beyond belief Ciat men c-in indurc what on ihe mdcnce of this wood the Germans have endured. In these bayonet charges quarter is not asked or given. The groundis burdened not. with wounded, but Willi dead, and those who advance against our trenches have almost always to make tl-eii wav over ewathes of their -Allen fellows. "Their losses have often been as fiftv to one, and the men who so sillier are fighting with little hope, ccrt-urny with n« enthusiasm. The battle of Ypres has for us been the battle of the war. The result is~ for the Allies, a few miles gained, and -reat losses; for the enemy death beyond reckoning and a defeated dream.