WITH THE FRENCH ARMY.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 April 1916, Page 6

WITH THE FRENCH ARMY.

OUII FALSE TRADITIONS.

CHEAT DEFENSIVE FIGHTERS.

(From H. S. Gullctt, Official Australian Correspondent with the French Army).

.... „ , . Paris. J-Jic 1-rcnch Army is as impressive to an Irishman as the British Navy is to .1 Frenchman. The French excel on -the land as wo do on the water. Jho Rc-eidental defeat of 1870, when there was a temporary failure of tjench leadership, lias been foolishly accepted as the failure of the French soldier, and as marking the deterioration ot the wncle rcoplc. Capably led, as he has been in this war, the French soldier to-day has no superioi in the world, and, measured in millions, no equal. Tne avmy as you see it is a marvel of strength arid efficiency. This war « the destrover of cluap and ia.se traditions, and among others that must be abandoned, is the tradition tnat the French were not defensive fighters. The truth is that their cflensive qualities are so magnificent that, we have been wont to deny them any defensive merits at all. The Frenchman has been rather proud of the charge; w H loves the assault, and excels at°it, tnat le has been somewhat contemptuous about the great negative qualities o- war. In England last year it was generally .'.hought that the French might soon grow tired of the struggle, because o: the necessity for so milch sitting still and the absence of opportunity for sustained and profitable aggression. Our ignorance of the fighting legions of the Kcpiil.ilic was almost tragic.

VvHAT THE FRENCH HAVE DONE.

Think what the French have done! As- you move among these, gallant troops you blus.i for your old doubts and fears about the people and the soldiers of * ranee, fi.-nl your mind is carried back to the most glorious pages of the nation's military history. Almost -single-handed she stopped the German hosts, and stopped them without trenches, fighting strategy against strategy and man against man—or one man to two—in the open as in the battles of the past. Then their sons manned 1300 miles of trenches, as against some 25 or 30 miles held at that .time by the British, and, fighting on the defensive, resisted every effort of the German hosts to break through. It wag the popular belief in England in those days that the Germans had a special desire to break through the British line and annihilate our "despicable little army." But common-sense tells us that the concern of the Germans wis to break the western front at its weakest point. .Had there been any weak spot in. the long French front, it was there that 'the enemy would have concentrated hh attack, and we know that he did attack the French at fifty different places. It cannot be too often repeated that had.the Germans defeated the French in their, first great onrush, and put the Republic out of action, the war must have been practically over. England might have kept up the blockade for twenty years, but she could never have hoped to conquer the Germans on land. The downfall of France would have been inevitably followed by the smashing of the Russian arms. You realise on this long battlefield that the menace of success--ful militarism was never as serious as it is to-day. Had Germany conquered France and Russia, she could have policed those countries with a few thousand troops. All she had to do wns to ensure that they could not manufacture machine guns, and artillery and munitions, and they were powerless. The truth is, if we are in the least generous, that we must admit that Krance practically saved herself and at the same time saved Europe. Her debt in the British Navy is.very great, much greater than to the little Expeditionary Force. If we recall that Germany invaded the Republic with two and a half millions of men, and that the British Expeditionary Force did not reach 100,000, we are compelled to give France her due. A strong France is almost as important for England's safety against Germany as a strong Navy.

SOLTT) METHODICAL QUALITIES. The French, on the defensive, have proved themselves possessed to a surprising degree of those solid methodical qualities which we liked to believe were the popular attribute of the British. The thoroughness of the French defences are positively depressing. You find it hard to believe that an army which looked for an advance within the near future would have expended so much design and hard labor and money upon the line of trenches which it at present occupies. On the British front you get the idea that we have been perhaps a little too optimistic: that we had hoped each week would be our last on the ground now occupied, and that soon we should be occupying positions further east. In the French lines you are. almost led to think that the people of the Republic are reconciled to a new and fixed frontier. Their trenches have not only a sense of complete security so far as the German offensive is concerned, but also an atmosphere of homely comfort. One mind seems to have designed and executed the whole system just as one exalted impulse dictates the supreme sacrifice, if need be, for its defence. When you observe the thoroughness and duplication of the French defences, there is borne in upon you a deeper conception of what we have to overcome on tin! German side before we reach that victory towards which we are striving, and which on this front at least we are surely attaining. Because we know from the German trenches already captured by the Allies that the enemy, too, excel at the defensive, although such a confession mpans tho overturning of much popular misconception in England at the commencement of the war, when it was believed that the German machine would fail if it could not constantly go forward. But in the French and German lines to-day there is this difference—the French have during the war enormously increased their man power, while their artillery and machine guns are multiplied from month to month and ilieir mnnitionment is now ample for every need: the. Germans, as we have the best of reasons for believing are diminishing every day in man power and no longer increase as they did in guns and mnnitionment. Already the advantage is with the French anil the British, and increasingly so; in the course of time this advantage will be- ■-... siiflieipiit-lv overwhelming to make progress practicable, and then war will ue over. Tin* French laugh if you tell them that their lines have an atmosphere of permanence. They are as confident of travelling east &s the British, but they are perhaps a little more careful of the lives of their soldiers than we are—a little less sporting when 't come* , to vital things— and so they l>n v ' •:*.■> celled with, engineering and ""> ''•■ ■ «j just as they have with, their • """.> j and infantry* ~ |

EXTRAORDINARY DUPLICATION

M one part of the Fipih.li lines we visited, a general told us that the total length of trendies, including reserve trenche* and eonuaunieatioms on a front of seventeen kilometers made up no less than 400 kilometers. The actual front line was multiplied twenty-three times! All of tliis trenching would be the usual depth; in addition there would be numberless great dugouts, or rather caves, and machine gun emplacements, perhaps a few redoubts and scores of fortified houses and posts. A single French redoubt would before the war have brought curious travellers from all over the world to marvel at the resourcefulness displayed in its creation; at its apparent maze and yet its perfect system. We went down many steps far into the darkness, with boarded floor and timbered sides and ceiling, passed along a gallery for perhaps fifty yards, and then ascended into the open of a little square village churchyard surrounded by an old stone wall some three feet tliick and eight feet high. We were well behind the front line, but here with its galleries and walls and trenches and its communication with the shattered village alongside a force might have survived for' days, possibly even weeks, after the front trenches had been carried. Thousands of troops might stream past on either side of the redoubt, but so long as it stands and can work a few machine guns, the doom of the enemy is certain. These islands have a hundred times stood unmoved amidst the wild flood of the invaders, and by their cross-fire have first arrested and th'en reduced the enemy battalions to chaos. Their strength being underground they are proof against days of shelling by the heaviest artillery, and when they are reduced it is by hand to hand fighting of the most terrible and bloodiest nature which takes place with bomb and bayonet and fist and fingers and teeth in dark underground passages. The one of which I write was a typical French countryside cemetery in war time. Here and there a shell had violently uprooted the resting places of generations of villagers; new crosses stood, above soldiers' graves which, although within a few hundred yards of the enemy lines, were fragrant with fresh flowers. I noticed the grave of a young German airman and remarked to an officer that it bore its cross and was carefully tended. "There is still some chivalry lpft," I suggested. "Yes," he replied, not without bitterness, "but only between the flying men. The German aviators appear to have escaped kultnr. We care for their dead, and we know they do for ours." It is well that this should be so, foi when the heroic airman falls, dead or wounded, he falls nearly always among his foes.

A SINISTER PINE FOREST.

We climbed a steep hill densely covered with a pine, forest eitending over thousands of acres. Our mission was a visit to formidable batteries of heavy guns, and as we followed a winding unmade footpath through the pines we wondered how the great guns were ever got into position. There were numbers of monster guns, and the hill was occupied by hundreds of men, but so skilful was the concealment that you might have passed over it many times and seen nothing more than an. occasional soldier. At a shout from the officer eager artillerymen lqapt like goblins from holes about tlie roots of the gloomy pines and sported maliciously round the guns. Touches from deft fingers, and evil muzzles raised themselves slowly but surely, for the top of the hill was between them and the enemy. Words of command rang out strangely in the stillness of the peaceful forests a thunderous crash; a pause for a minute as it seemed, and then came the dull Doom of the shell as it Durst miles away in the country of the enemy. The officer spoke again; tho men went back to their caves, and silence fell among the pines. So operates tho decisive machinery in the war, ,

AN OBSERVATION POST. As we climbed up towards an observation post wo passed a jagged hole in the turf which suggested that some huge hellish iron hand had reached down and clutched earth and rock and roots at random. Oiu guide smiled. "So far,'' he said, ''they have not succeeded in finding us, although they are always shooting." We had glimpses of telephone wires and wireless installations and boxes of keen carrier pigeons. The telephones are sufficient communication between the observers and their batteries upon peaceful days like this, but should an attack comes with its hurricane of shells destroying even the underground telephones and wireless stations, the pigeons might mean the saving or the carrying of a position. Should the pigeons be destroyed there are still the old-fashioned signallers and runners, and after them detailed prearranged time-tables. And yet despite all this we know that in nearly every serious atttack on trenches in the war, artillery and infantry have sootier or later lost their cennection. That is the commonest cause of chaos and failure. DIRECTING THE GUNS.

Our hill ends in a sheer drop of some hundreds of feet down to a wide fluoded river valley, in which are the. opposing trenches. We peer down the chalky network showing white against the dark wet surface soil, and it is apparently so hopeless in design and rude in execution that it might have been the achievement of two races of drunken supermen fiercely working in the darkness. (An aerial photograph of trenches looks like the result of some competitive blindfold drawing game at a children's party).), We observe from the shelter of trees and barriers of brandies renewed from night to night to ensure that the enemy shall not get the information from fading leaves. Then a hundred yards to the rear in a dense part of the forest we proceed to see the invariable alternative. We dip into a hollow in the ground and pass along a dry timbered passage in, which we can comfortably walk erect, and descend sharply. Soon each member of the party is standing in a little cave to himself, far down the- side of the bluff, and looking through narrow horizontal slits at leisure and in safety over tho field of conflict. From therethe military observers can see with precision the bursting of every shell flung from the great blind guns behind the hill.