THE WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 January 1916, Page 8

THE WAR.

IN ,THE WEST. IN THE TRENCHES. CAPTAIN ' BEAN'S VISIT. AN INTERESTING COMPARISON. (Special from Australian War Correspondent). Wellington, Yesterday. Under date London, January 22 (7,30 p.m.), Captain Bean reports:— By tile kindness of the British War Office I have been permitted to pay a short visit to the British front in .France and Flanders, which I was particularly desirous of making in order to be able to draw a jnst comparison between the conditions of the campaign at Gallipoll and those of the grtat struggle on the western front. My experience of officials dealing with correspondents has been from first to last that, far from putting, difficulties in their way as the common supposition is, they have consistently gone out of their way to help one in the performance of his duties to the fullest extent consistent with regulations. The trenches at Anzac were much the best in Gallipoli and incomparably more elaborate than the best I have seen in France. In France the troops making trenches have to struggle the whole time against the influx of water. Except during a portion of summer, when the earth of Flanders is as dry as in the lower parts of Gallipoli, the troops on the western front have taken constant steps against the encroachment of water. Tunnelled trenches, like those of which there was a complete system around parts of the Anzac line, would immediately fill with water in most parts of the line here and would have to be shored up heavily with wooden props and roof Yearns. The system of deep dug-outs into the hearts of the hills, in which a great part of an army corps could be marched, and live there as long as they wished in perfect security Jrom any known projectile, would be quite out of the question on some parts of the- western front. The conditions at Aanzac made it possible to dig there with inordinate labor what are probably some of the best trenches known to military science.

ARTILLERY FIRE COMPARED. The artillery fire in France seemed to rae to be about as constant as in Gallipoli. The target for the German guns is nothing like so crowded and concentrated here as the closely-peopled areas nt Helles and Suvla, On the other hand, the Turks were not generally such good gunners, and I doubt if their'explosives were always of the most modern type. The fearful bombardments which both sides administer to each other In Fr.;nce and Flanders were never approached in Gttllipoli except by the French guns, and on a few occasions toy our naval guns, when they caught the enemy coming down, the seaward slopes of the hills. The Allied lines in Gallipoli were never subjected to such torrents of shell as preceded and succeeded battles like Loos and Neuve Chapelle. v : BEHIND THE LIXES Tlie tension in the trenches at Gallipoli, especially at Anzac, was considerably greater than in France. The old line at Anzac originally hung on to the edge of a cliff, and the only way to create second and third lines was constantly to push forward and steal ground under the enemy's rifle's. This work never ended from .the day we landed to the very las* 'week. Constant sapping, tunnelling and mining along the whole line, at immense labor, finally produced two, three and sometimes more lines of wonderful deep trenches and brought our lines,in a number of places Within 25 yards of the enemy, and in several places within 15 yards, or closer. Mining, which was unhampered by water, was a continuous enemy along a great part of the line. The enemy was constantly mining towards us in order to deprive us of our narrow ground and, though the Turks were utterly outclassed at the game, this made the normal tension along the front line greater than seemed to me to exist in the portions of the line which I saw in France. The whole great system of the hinterland, which so impresses every visitor to the Western line—immense convoys, heavy lorries camped at the roadside or trooping slowly across'the flats was, of course, absent in Gallipoli. Our hinterland ended half a mile to a milc v and a half from the trenches. The exaggerated effects of shell-fire in tons, the. heartrending spectacle of a civilian lying face downward in the gutter, with old women running towards the tragedy or away, from it, young wives and little. children standing at open doorways with the strain imprinted on every line of their, pale faces, wc saw none of this in Gallipoli. There you did not -feel the presence of a real living, enmity which, in spite of the cheery faces, gives a constant Sense of seriousness iii the trendies in the West. The combat at Gallipoli was not fought with gas, or even with the newest and greatest guns and projectiles. The army there ha«l to do with what it could conveniently procure, for example the bombs on both side? on the whole were more oldfashioned than in France. The strain of hand-to-hand bomb-fighting was more general in Gallipoli. because the lines on the whole were closer. WEATHER CONDITIONS. The summer in Gallipoli was trying, owing to the dust, heat, and especially the (lies, which resulted in far mora sickness; but I doubt if the weather conditions were so disagreeable as the mud, rain, and slimy wet and crumbling trenches of the Western front. The real discomfort of all in the Gallipoli campaign was that whatever discomforts there were shells, rifle fire, flies, the untold hard work of tunnelling and trenchdigging, food and water carrying, lack of wood and iron, and last, but not least, lack of canteen stores such as tinned fruit and butter—it was Impossible to obtain relief from them, HARDSHIPS OF GALLIPOLI Brigades were in the trenches four, five, and six months without relief. The so-called rest camp was often within a hundred yards of the firing line, and always under shell fire, and the rest consisted largely in mining and watercarrying, so that the units honestly preferred the trenches. The Army Service CorDs, ambulances, and »omo 'hosgltftlj

lost a. higher proportion of men from shell fire than if in the trenches. The brigade, divisional, and even the Army Corps headquarters were much closer than many battalions' headquarters in France. In short, each field of war has peculiar difficulties. But what I have seen in France has convinced me that the Gallipoli campaign may be rightly estimated as one of somewhat exceptional and unavoidable hardship.