ARTILLERY'S GREAT TUMULT.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 September 1916, Page 7

ARTILLERY'S GREAT TUMULT.

SLACKENS BUT NEVER CEASES. ROADS OF WAR AT NIGHT DESCRIBED. DIFFICULTIES OP CROSSING NO MAN'S LAND. (By Phillip Gibbs.—Received by Mail). With the British Army in the Feld. July 20. Along the front of our attack, from ! Pozierea eastward tc the no'i'th of Bazen-tin-le- Grand and Foreaux Wood and swinging south to Delville Wood and Guillemont, the battle goes on by night as well as by day, and the fire of guns never ceases. German "crumps" are crashing over the trenches of Bazentin and smashing the trees in the lower end of Delville Wood. The steady rush of our shells overhead suddenly becomes a pandemonium of artillery. Some signals have gone up and all our batteries are answering the call. The red flames of the trench mortars are leaping all along the line. Hell has broken out once more, and there is no rest except for those who will die before dawn.

So it was last night again. There were no lights on our cars. The sentry had all the light as lie swung his lantern, and it gleamed on the bayonets of the men standing close to him in the doorway of the barn. It was all pitch darkness except for the red eyes glowing down the dark tunnels where the lorries, with dim tail lights, crawled forward through the French Tillages 'with breakfast for the men'and guns. There was no moon, but the sky was fairly pale, and our driver groped forward very slowly, telling his way by the shapes of things and by their degrees of blackness. SHADOWS ON ROADS OF WAR. The roads of war at night are full of moving shadows. Supply columns • creep along, dispatch riders without any kind of lamps swoop down the black roads at an increasing pace], seeing like bats. Last night there were horsemen on the roads. Groups of four rode at fifty paces apart. By the shape of their head-dress I could see they were Indians. Guns went by with lanterns here and there beaming—French, by the shape of the helmets on the heads of the men who dropped forward a little over their horses necks. There were no soldiers marching. They were behind the lines, asleep. Through the open doors of barns, dimly lighted by lanterns, I saw their bodies and I heard the sound of their breathing. We left our car alongside the road, climbed a steep bank, and went toward the battle of the night. In the night we passed through small encampments of soldiers, most of them in darkness. Only very dimly could one see the shapes of the tent 3. Some of the men were sleeping separately, curled up in tho depth of shell-holes, as I have seen dead men, but comfortable and sheltered from the light breeze. The black outlines of the cookers and transport waggons framed each small camp.

SHELLS ABOVE. HOLES BENEATH. But further on the > was another camp where some troops had just arrived and were sitting down after their long march. They had fires burning which threw a ruddy glare upon their bodies as they moved about, dumping their stores. The cookers were smoking and there was a smell of good soup in the air.

"What's your regiment?" asked one of the officers with me, and the man told us, in broad speech. He did not seem surprised to see three strangers in the camp at this hour of the night. A entry stood in front of one of the fires, a sturdy Scottish figure, with the red light flung upon him. He turned his head as we passed, but did not call out a challenge, as, perhaps, he ought to have done, taking us for granted as he and all his men did not bother their heads about other things passing in the night—great shells overhead like rushing trains to reach the Journey's end yonder above Bazentin-le-Grand and Dclv'ille Wood, where many shells were bursting. So we went on, falling into invisible trenches and crawling out of shell holes. Such a journey teaches one the difficulties of No Mail's Land, and the reason why patrols lose their sense of direction sometimes and try to get home by way of the German lines. Telephone wires coiled themselves about our feet, bits of barbed wixe entanglements suddenly pricked us as we went groping forward. The shout of the lookout came too lato to stop the sudden plunge into the old communication trench no longer used, now that the war is in the open again, for the time at least. GREAT TUMULT OF ARTILLERY. The battle was going on as it has nevei ceased going on since July 1. There never was a moment when the guns wore quiet nnr a second When the great tumult of artillery did more than slacken a little into the quietude that is only comparable between a greater or lesser noises. There is nothing like the two bombardments of July 1 and 14. It was what would be called officially ''no great activity and just the ordinary night of battle where there was no attack or counter-attack."

All along tlie lines lights wore rising. Both sides were sending up white flares

by which they could see any hostile movements. It was as though groups of jugglers were there in the darkness, throwing up white balls of fire, trviiig to keep as many as possible in the air at the same time. They gave a slowburning and vivid white light which made the grey of the break of day across the fields like phosphorescent water, giving a sharp picture of outlined detail. All through the night they were there. I counted only three times when, for a second or two, there were 110 lights up, and when for just what time our eyes were bathed and refreshed in the brief darkness.

GUNNERS ANSWER SIGNAL LIGHTS,

I will not describe the night bombardment in detail, as I have already given pictures of its effect in other despatches. The same sounds were here again and the same sights, the thundersttfoke of our great guns away behind woro shaking the earth and sending forth bolts which tore with a rush through the air, the sharp rat-a-tat-tat of the field batteries .close to where I lay, the awful cnumps of the German shells bursting over our positions, the little red flames followed by the running pools of light as our big guns fired, the high, uncanny whistling of■these night birds of death in flight for tlhe enemy's side and the sudden "zeep" of a piece of s'liell falling close. These things are always the sama in a night bombardment;

But last night there were certain details of difference. It was about 3 o'clock when I was tempted to wake lip the. two officers who lay by my side sleeping like babies. A pandemonium of fire had broken out between Longueval and Bazentin, and the signals wero rcrketing up with red and white lights, as though the men were in a greiut state of excitement. Then our trench mortors got to work, and for half an hour this lijrlit artillery flung out explosives which burst up and down the enemy's line with a continual burst of machine gun fire sweeping to and fro, and then suddenly there was a, rapid volley of ritle fire. In a minute or two our gunn;.rs answered the signal lights and from batteries shells came rushing in the direction of the enemy's position north of Longueval. JUST AN EPISODE OF NIGHT BATTLE. Whatever was happening there was the devil to pay and many men were being killed unless German soldiers have dug deeply underground since we broke their second line, which is doubtful. The affair was just an episode of the night in one part of the line, not important, evidently, for, in the morning bulletin, which refers to Poaieres, I sec that elsewhere "no incident of importance has taken place." 1 was elsewhere, and it seemed to me at the time highly important, and that is why I described this scene. It is not extraordinary, but ordinary, and our men in the fighting line spend such nights under shells from one week to another, and have no rest while they are there. In the morning, when the light came, giving a wan, bedraggled look to the fields, I went back again to the camps. -As soon as the first aeroplane came skimming toward the German lines the guns began to get. liijv for the . day. The night's work had been dtne and the job was starting all over again.

FOLIAGE COVERS CORPSES. BRITISH BARRAGE OF FIRE Al l DEVIL'S WOOD, "WORST SPOT IN WHOLE WORLD." With the British Armies in the Field, July 27. At about' 10 o'clock this morning our troops again took Delville Wood, all but a narrow strip on the north, and perhaps, it is the last time it will be necessary to send men, to the assault of this position which lias earned t'lie nickname ''Devil's Wood" from the soldiers who have been through it and out or it. One of our officers said to me "I wish to goodness we could wipe the place off the map or burn it off. A good forest fire there, would cleaiv.se the ground of this filthy wreckage of trees, which has been the death trap to so many good fellows." It is a queer thing that so many trees are still standing, and that it looks like a wood, as I saw it the other day, when the enemy was barraging this side of it. In s;:.te of all the trees that have been cut down by the shells, the foliage still looks dense at a distance, and hides all the horror underneath. SERIES OF BARRAGES. To-day many more trees have been slashed off and hurled upon the other fallen trunks, I am told that our concentration of guns for this morning's bombardment secured the most intense series of barrages from one position since the battle of Pieurdy began 27 days ago. Twice as heavy as any similar artillery attack the bombardment began early this morning and took line after line from south to north above the ground held by our men in progressive blocks of fire. Our batteries over an area of several miles, from the long range "heavies" to the 18-poundcrs flung every size shell into the Devil's Wood and filled it with high explosive and shrapnel no that one great volume of smoke rose from it and sobered it in a dense pall. It seems impossible that any Germans there could still he left alive, but it is too soon to know whether our men found any of them crouching in holes or lying under the slielter of the groat trunks and roots. Perhaps a few German soldiers may come out from this place of death, having' escaped by what seems like a miracle' except that every day men do escape in the strangest way from shells which burst above them and under them and around them.

WORST PLACE OX EARTH, But there will not be many who tell the tale o£ this morning's bombardment of the wood, for the enemy has not had time to make an elaborate system of dugouts here deep enough to protect them from the (i-inch or S-inili shells, but had no more cover than our own men who held the wood when it was the turn of the enemy's artillery. It was talking to some of these men this morning and they all had the same tale to tell.

"Devil's Wood," said one of them, "is easily the worst place on earth. As far as I can guess it is just crowded with corpses, and to stay there is to join their company. The only cover one tan get is to crawl under a log and hope for the best or crawl into a shell hole and expect the worst, which generally arrives. 1 had the devil's own luck —a puncture of the left leg—so I can't walk back there."

He was amazed to have come out so easily and because he had still life and could see the sun shining through the flap of the tent. He was in high spirits, like all our men who had the luck to got a "cushic" wound, which, in this war, is the best of luck to men in such places as Devil's Wood. The other men were eloquent about the German snipers, who wore hiding in the foliage of the trees with rifles and machine guns and waited very patiently until any of our men began to crawl through the tree trunks. Tlaat game is finished. Our bombardment this morning must have swept away all such men with whatever weapons they had. CROWDED WITH DEAD. Devil's Wood has become more crowded with dead and it is over these bodies that our men stumbled this morning when tliey wont forward slowly and cautiously behind the barrage of our guns, which cleared the way for them. Tliay advanced in waves, halting while another barrage was maintained for half un hour or more, ahead. They had to cross Prince's street, which is a sunken road made into something like a trench by the South Africans and afterwards by the Scots from homo, striking across the glades from west to east, and then they pushed northward. I have 110 details of the fighting, which is still in progress, but it is probable the attack has succeeded without many casualties. It is in holding ground that the worst time comes to the men who capture it. The history of the fight that lias gone on in this corner of ground since July 14 is one of the most wonderful things for sheer stubborn courage that has been done ia all this sreat battle.