BRITISH ARTILLERY.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 May 1916, Page 3

BRITISH ARTILLERY.

HOW IT HAS EXPANDED. One of the most interesting of the recent messages from Mr. Philip Gibbs dealt with the expansion of the artillery, and especially with the abundance of shells. ''Time was, a year ago," he says, "when our batteries were scattered rather thinly behind the lines; and when our gunners had te be very thrifty of shells, saving them up anxiously for hours of great need when the SOS rocket shot up a green light from some battered trench upon which the enemy were concentrating hate. Those were ghastly days for gunner officers who had io answer telephonic messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being shelled to pieces by longrange howitzers, or from engineers whose working parties were being snioed to death by German field guns, or from a brigadier wiio wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could not deal with a certain gun wkich was enfilading a certain trench and piling up the casualties. It was hard to say 'Sorry! . .

We've got to go slow with ammunition.' "That is ancient history. During tiie past eight months or so the fields have grown a new crop of British batteries, and they are no longer thinly scattered. Month after month our ,we'ight of metal lias increased, and while the field guns have been multiplying at a great rate the 'heavies' have been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and more sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolls over the battlefields by day and nignt. There is a much larger supply o. shells for all those pieces, and there is no longer the same need for thrift when there is urgent need for artillery 'support. Retaliation is the order of the day, and if the enemy asks for trouble by any special show of 'hate' he gets it quickly and with a frightful intensity. Our gunners never leave the enemy alone now. Apart from th| concentrated bombardments of such a recent affair as the Bluff, the ordinary day's routine is quite active enough to keep the batteries busy. As a young artillery officer said to' me (we were walking through a ruined village into whicli the enemy had poured hundreds of shells, so that the ground is pitted with the craters). 'There's quite a lot of variety in our job which keeps one from fretting,' They are always searching for new targets, besides those whicli hang up on a card in the gun-pits, registered for immediate fire after a little allowance for atmospheric error, and somewhere in an observation post is one of their officers, with watchful eyes behind a pair of binoculars, and a telephone operator at his elbow to sead a quick word down to the battery." Mr. Cii'bbs gives, too, many interesting glimpses of the work of the artillery. "The artillery officers," he relates, "take turns as a rule in the observation posts, sleeping for the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in the billet below where there are two or three beds on the. top floor of a dilapidated barn, and some Kitchener pictures on the walls to give an air of refinement to the place, and some shrapnel holes in the roof through which the melting snow drips. The way to the observation post is sometimes a little unknown, especially in this frost-and-thaw weSlther, when parts of the communication trenches tre apt to slither down under the weight of sandbags. The young officer, who once walked in another street of adventure with just the same luminous eyes and eager stop, finds it necessary to crawl on his stomach before he jets to his look-out station from which he l»oks straight across the enemy's trenches. But once there, it is pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from above or a little mining operation underneath'. He makes a seat of a well-filled sandbag (it was rather a shock when he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman there) and smokes Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma and sits there very solitary and watchful. The rats worry hiai a Utile—they are bold enoujh to bare their teeth when they meet him down a trench, and there is one big fellow called Cuthbert, who romps reund his dug-out, and actually bit his ear one night. But these inconveniences do not seem to give any real distress to the soul of youth, out there alone, and searching for human targets, to kill.

"The gunners have a better time than the infantry, and they are the first to acknowledge it, having great pity for the men in the trenches who stand between the opposing batteries and form hose targets in the battle of guns. The gunners are always taking the offensive, and know with a fair degree of certainty the effect of their fire. As my friend says, they have 'variety' in their job, and escape the intolerable boredom of trench life, which is carried only by its hideous endurance of bombardment. The risks are great even for the gunners, but they have some kind of a chance. It is the chance, that the enemy's air pilots may make a little error of 2flyds or so in the location of the battery, so that the shells which- follow his flight make a harmless mess in a neighboring field. Or it is the chance that they can get their guns into a new position and hide them craftily as soon as they have been 'spotted' by one of these searching rovers. Yesterday, when one of these came over, the! whistle blew, and the men disappeared into their pits, and there was no sign of life to give away our whereabouts! in that expanse of snow and mud where many British batteries form a girdle of Are when a general bombardment is in progress.

"In an older type of war, no man would have thought it possible to live a day in such surroundings. The enemy's shells come whistling across the landscape and plough deep holes in the roadways and Holds. They have churned up the graves in a churchyard, disinterring old bones, and I counted, at least twenty enormous craters in the near neighborhood. 'Silent ■■ Susan'—a high velocity lady—comes with noiseless death into a field where the gun teams play football in spare half-hours. All this battle-ground, where our batteries are invisible except for their flashes,, is crossed and recrossed by the enemy's gun-lire, but our gunners walk unconcernedly about, as when I went with them yesterday, and think themselves lucky because they are not in the trenches. Their great desire always is to be in a 'big show' when their guns can get a real 'look in,' but every day new all along our lines they are registering on new targets and inflicting great, damage on the enemy. So on each side the battle of guns goes on, and whether there is snow or rain, wind or calm, there is always, in our ears the long low rumble of that great artillery."