ALLIES READY.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 June 1916, Page 7

ALLIES READY.

AT SALONIKA. PATHLESS WASTES MADE IMPHEGNABLE. (G. Ward Price, in the Daily Mail). Army Headquarters, Salonika,' March 12. The top of the "Matterhorn" is cer--1 tainly a pleasant place this warm spring morning. It is an eyrie commanding nearly one-half of our position, a lonely, conical, rocky height, only second in conspicuousness to Gibraltar, which Brands over against it three miles away.

"Gibraltar," however, would be the enemy's if he could get there—the enemy of whom We have heard so much anil seen so little that most of the Salonika Force.has begun to think of him as a kind of myth, not even 90 substantial as'the half-company and the row of flags that used to figure under the same name in peace manoeuvres at Home. Yet, for all his invisibility, he is a stem taskmaster—a regular Old Man of the Sea, whose weight is very perceptible upon your shoulder though your eyes behold him not. It is thanks to this unseen tyrant, "the enemy," that thousands of sturdy backs have been bent for months over pick and shovel, carving out those lines of trenches that stretch through sand and rock and clay, in heavy soil and light, over the hills and along the plain. What a work -it has been! What labor, what ingenuity, what energy have been spent in the last three months getting ready for the enemy —and now it looks, after all, as if he were going to fail us at the rendezvous. He will have a heavy account to face, will the enemy, if he ever meets the men of the Salonika Force. With muscles tautened by weeks of swing pick and spade and backs broadened by carrying untold loads of earth and stones, several scores of thousands of British soldiers will be anxious to have an explanation concerning a certain visit he was always talking about paying and never paid.

TIK LAST STAGE. And this morning one of the rcry lust stages of preparation is to be carried through; the artillery is to register its ranges. That implies that every artillery general is at last satisfied with the position of his guns, and in the eloar sunshine of this early spring day ouch battery will open fire on conspicuous objects along its front until it has found and registered the exact range of each, so that if the enemy should come our gunners can use these landmarks to open fire at once with almost certain accuracy. The por.ular idea of artillery fire as being merely a bang at one end and a hurst at the other scon corrects itself as you listen to a lot of'guns of different calibre in action. Each kind of shell has its own war-whoop. Some lea]) from the muzzle, with a long minor wail that sounds as if it ought to leave a visible streak in the air.' They are the Impounders; they have no illusions about possessing immense destructive powers; they know tlifct their greatest effect is to be produced by getting at their mark before he has time to jump into the shelter of a gully; a business-like, cll'icient little shell "If the ficrmaiis at the beginning of the war had only had as good quality shrapnel as ours," I am told, "things might not have been as well advanced as they are." Then there is the lumbering, deliberate sort of noise that a four-point-seven makes; a cruel shell this—he drones along thoroughly enjoying the emotions that his approach causes among his unfortunate human targets. More impressive still is the Olympian thunder which accompanies the march across the sky of a six-inch shrapnel.

AWAITING THE ATTACK. Turn your back upon the firing aiu l look round over our own lines. It is an amazing spectacle of human labor. Last October this hill-country was a pathless waste, and now camps, depots, earthworks, and roads arc everywhere. They twist and radiate and curve over slopes that have felt the tread of many a!mies, but of never a one that tamed them so thoroughly as we have done. There are crossings with as great a choice of routes as at Piccadilly circus. In many places there is a network of alternative tracks beside-- the metalled main road. This winds its way in ample curves up the hillside and is used by the heavy transport wagons and the cars that astonish chose solitudes, but there are shorter cuts used by horsemen and marching infantry, plainly marked across the turf. Evoiy road has its name, every bill lias been surveyed and christened.