"OUR DAILY NEWS."

Taranaki Daily News, 11 December 1915, Page 12 (Supplement)

"OUR DAILY NEWS."

HOW IT READS IN GALLIPOLI. THE WAR REPORT GLOSSARY. (By tlie Australian Press Representative, Captain Bean.) Dardanelles, Oct. 12. Can we not see it all? Every day there reaches us, wired specially from the War Office, a short summary of what is happening in all the other fields of the war. It is printed on a single foolscap sheet, and posted up on most of the notice boards in the base. I often used to wonder before we left Australia what exactly was meant by "progressed in the Argonne or in the Champagne district," "Consolidated our positions," etc. A modern war report has a sort of fixed terminology, wliicli reminds one of the terminology of the law courts in the days of the old common law procedure. NORTH Or" aKRAS

"North of Arras there is artillery activity." Cannot one see it? We have the counterpart of every paragraph in the news sheet here. First we have an eighteen-pounder shrapnel bursting high, followed by another bursting so. low it is almost like a hammer blow upon your head, the. pellets hissing over the parapet .like hail. Other shells arrive from the south and from the east—your own batteries begin to answer the enemy's Batteries. If they cannot hit his guns they hit his infantry upon the principle of at any rate hitting him somewhere whenever he hits you, a principle which is impartially used both by ourselves and the Turks. The hubbub lasts perhaps half an hour, perhaps an hour, perhaps more. It always may mean an attack, and so you have your ways of guarding against it, which I am not going to describe. In the end in nine cases out of ten it subsides as suddenly as it has begun, and ,nothing more comes of it. OUR TRENCH MORTARS.

"In the district of Hartsmannsweilerkopf our trench mortars have seriously damaged the enemy trenches." One can see now a small group of Australians who had been bending over a squat instrument, which looks, what you can see of it in the night, like an early piece of medieval artillery, if not actually invented by Archimedes. A steel rod is rammed down the barrel; the iron bomb at the end protrudes out of the muzzle like the head of a club. There is a flash —a line of sparks rockets high, ever so high, in the air, slowly turns, and makes a line right down towards the darkness in front of the trench. Out of the darkness come distant squeals—a hubbub—then your parapet stands out against an ugly wide flash, like that of summer lightning, and then comes the almost simultaneous low car-r-runch of a high explosive.

The Turks started to roof over all their important trenches very soon after we got those guns. The solid roof of Lone Pine through which the Ist Brigade had to break was a tribute to our trench mortars. They range from little weapons, looking like 18 inches of gas pipe, to the great antiquated mortars, half-way between a toad and a gigantic eggcup, which are used by the Turks. The Turks had one which threw a bomb which streaked across the sky with a tail of fire 20 feet long; and they are evgn using a genuine rocket with a high explosive head. "SHE'S LAID AN" EGG." And then "our aeroplanes dropped bombs on the enemy's headquarters." There is a distant purr, which you diagnose as a motor car—here in Gallipoli it always means an aeroplane. You watch her carefully circle over the enemy's lines, and someone remarks, "She's laid an egg; there it goes." You can see the bomb fall, an infinitesimal yellow object, and you realise that there is coming on the wind a distant rrrm—rrm—rrrm—caused by some unusual form of missile. It ends with the same deep crunch, and, perhaps two minutes afterwards, the dust of some distant explosion begins to drift 011 the wind across the hilltop above you. "WE PROGRESSED." "We progressed four hundred yards near Givencliy"—that is to say, after dark—possibly just as the moon rose—a number of parties crept out ovgr the parapet and rushed the opposite trench. If so it "consolidated the position"— that i 9, one party sweated its heart out hauling the sandbag parapet off one side of the trench and piling it on the other, blocking communication trenches with sandbag barriers. The consolidating party followed after it with picks and more sandbags, and worked like demons till morning or till the first shower of bombs over the new barrier showed the counter-attack had begun. If the trenches were close the attack probably began with the explosion of three or four mines under the enemy's trench, or when the engineers judged they were under it. "Mining activity" in the war report probably means that they were content" to blow up some of the enemy's mines, in which case the man who risks most is probably the engineer officer who goes down the tunnel first after the explosion at the imminent risk of being poisoned. .That, by the way. is ''gas poisoning,' which lias. appeared in the Anzac casualty lists. WHAT WAR IS. You must not imagine that life in one of these year-long modern battles consists of continuous bombing, fighting, bayoneting, and bombarding all the time. These "progresses," "eonsolidatings" "oomb-droppings," "artillery activity" of the war reports are the incidents in long, weaiv months, whose chief occupation is the digging of mile upon mile of endless sap, of sunken road through which the troops and mules can move safely behind; the driving of whole rabbit warrens of tunnels by sweating, half-naked miners working by the light of candles 1 far into the hearts of hills, a? you might see them in any metal mine in Broken Hill or Cobar —indeed, tlie miners are probably most of them from those very same mines. The carrying of biscuit boxes and building timbers for lnurs daily, the waiting in well queues of ■thirty for half a mile uphill, the digging of those same wells themselves, the sweeping and disinfecting of trenches in the never-ending fighting (lies—this is the soldiers' life for nine days out of ten in a modern battle. War consists of a long series of what seem at the time to be endless delays interspersed by short bursts of frantic hurry. It is of the short bursts that you naturally hear most in the newspapers, becaute theie are the important events.

Of the long boredom in between —the boredom of • unvarying work, which is probably really more bearable than the boredom of unvarying idleness—the war reports, I daresay, give you as good au impression as anything else. Any way, they give little impression of variety. THE BRECI'OUS TRUTH. And they have the merit of being generally true. It may be the public finds its chief difficulty in knowing how much importance to attach to the daily incidents they chronicle. When the Turns announce, for example, as they have just done, that their artillery bombarded the trenches near Abi Burnu with success, they really mean that they did nothing. The "with success" is a mere flourish, and the casual bombardment of trenches is simply make-believe fighting —a way of filling in time, when you have not the least intention of attacking for the present with your infantry. And so are nearly all "artillery duels," most "air raids," juid many "bombing encounters." THE COUXTERPAJRT. i Every photograph of trendies in France shows us the counterpart of some trench in Gallipoli. Every description of trenvli fighting there might have been written in the Dardanelles. And when you find that a> vast proportion of the stories of events said to have happened in the Dardanelles were pure fiction you cannot help the impression that a great part of the stories of other parts or the war is almost fiction, too. Indeed, probably, this campaign is different to the rest in tliat, owing to the authorities allowing war correspondents on to the actual battlefield, the proportion of true news is probably higher than in any other theatre of the war. Rut even from here there has passed into the British or press the Queenslander who fell in grip with a Turk into the sea oi'er a cliff which does not exist. There are plenty of cliffs at Anzae, but none within 100 yards of the sea; there is the utterly fictitious German-Australian who shot his officers from behind; there are "swarms" of spies upon our beaches, who, I believe, reduce themselves in the case of Anzae to a single doubtful instance; there is the German officer who shot a stretcher-bearer who was dressing his wounds. There is so much real heroism outstanding, and self-sacrificing in the history of Anzac, and so much •true drama, that it goes against everyone's grain to see so muck that is purely imaginary pass, as I suppose it stands a good chan'ee of doing, into the nation's history.