"THROUGH HELL."

Taranaki Daily News, 11 May 1916, Page 8

"THROUGH HELL."

HUNS USE PETROL SPRAY. FIEDNISHKESS OF THEIR WAR METHODS. That a man rushing out to stop a fast- railway train with a walking stick is 110 more powerless than the infantryman who has to charge in the face of the machine-guns is the conclusion of an officer serving on the Western front! Tn one of his letter home he describes in vivid fashion what he calls "a charge through hell." "You never saw such a mess in your like as there is where I am now," lie writes. "I am not allowed to say where, but it is one of the famous spots, once a smiling village, peaceful, with pretty women, fair lawns, gardens, industries, quaint buildings, a beautiful church and lovely wayside shrines. Now it is past description; just a mass of ruins. The streets are covered with debris, the fields ploughed with shell holes; the rivers are even so choked with weeds, etc., that they refuse to flow. The only thing that compares with it that 1 know is Edgar Allan Poe's fantasy, 'Shadow.' Desolation reigns supreme. "I saw eight '.Tack Johnstons' burst to-day, and they just tear away bricks and mortar like paper; it is' simply marvellous. You first hear a noise like an aeroplane, and something passes over your head leisurely on its way; then a bang like nothing else in the world and after that dust, bricks, trees, and, if any, limbs and bits go shooting up a hundred feet in a cloud of thick black smoke, which lingers like a fiend contemplating his work. The ghoulishHess of it all occurs to one when in churchyards the graves get blown open. "Who is going to put it right? I don't know, but the mess here will take fifty years to clean up. I wish vou were here to sec it all. It is so wonderful and yet so fiendish that any man who saw 'it would join up at once* to stop for ever the Germans from forming a rule of this nature upon the world. They must be smashed even as these town's are, and then should be made slaves to work in perpetual serfdom to repair their hellish damage. "What would strike you is the awesome deliberation of the war. You can hardly'imagine how cool and calculating the whole business is. When you read in your papers, 'British Advance Three Miles in Flanders,' it is impossible to realiso how much work it has meant. In the last battle -we were in, and a very big one too, you could see troops moving in thousands for days before hand. Everywhere men. men, men—and then the guns began, You did not 9eeln able to move for the guns. Bang, boom, liofim—all day, all night! no cessation of the noise at all —just one big, long roll all the time. "Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach along the German trenches, was smoke, and when we did see the trenches afterward they were just craters, with bits of men in them, dead and mutilated. Then, after days of this undiluted hell, came the infantry attack. It seemed grisly anil strange, the clammy sort of silence as the big guns gave up and only the Maxims and the rifles went off. You can imagine the dirty work that was going on—bayonet and revolver and rifle.

"Wo lose heavily. But what a price fi>v flic Germans'! . They lose double what wo do. The artillery, when they Ret it, gel it bad, but "the infantryman has not tl;j same chances in the open, for thfy blaze at him all the time, and he has to charge through hell. Fancy a man lTthing out. to stop a fast railway train with a walking stick. Well, that is just what- the infantryman iloes whoci ho , goes 011 the parapet in the face of the muehino-jimis. 'lf yen had seen .what I have seen you would not lHiovs ihat men could fac.; it. but tltiy <i>■. Hies;- Scottish are the boys. The Germans tied some of them together at Neiivo Chapelle and 'bombed' (hem to death. You have no idea of the dirty tricks of the German.*. They spray them with petrol, then send over incendiary bombs which set fire to them. But don't worry, vv<> shall deal with them all right. I am not a bit downhearted; 'au con-train-I,' I am very happy, my only regret- being that I cannot see you,"