UNDER ENGLISH FIRE.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 November 1916, Page 7

UNDER ENGLISH FIRE.

GERMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. •HORROR WITHOUT END, Of the British offensive that was "virtually ended" and of the battle tjiat was "all but won" a month ago Baron von Dusseldorf, a special correspondent of the Dusseldorf General-An-zeiger, writes a shuddering account from the trenches' on the Sonime front at the beginning of September. "You cannot imagine," he says, "you cannot grasp what human beings to-day can withstand in this heaped-up horror-without-eud. Two long months the battle on the Somme has lasted, and troops that fought in the deadliest sectors round Verdun declare that there it was by comparison mild! "Under the enemy's artillery fire, largely from guns of Tin. to Uin., we lie or squat .just where we are, often crowded together as closely as leadsoldiers in their box. We wonder whether tlie . shelter will stand another heavy shell, whether that last light explosion was gas, whether we shall ever be able to find the way to the front trench igain, or if we shall have to cross the wilderness of shell-craters when we have to break, up the infantry attack. "In front of us the trench is a sheer ruin, but we have to bold out in it, pressing our bodies deep into the fragment .of protection that remains, and often half lovered with (lend , and wounded comrades who weigh heavy upon our backs. "In all this overcharged horror there comes, as it were by a merciful dispensation of nature, a certain insensibility to all fears; quite simple thoughts pass through one's mind. 'So it is to end here! Here in this fresh-hewn hole in the earth over whose lip some thistles peer lam to go out!" One simply notes this fact, neither bewailing it nor fearing it, and one prays only that at least it may prove one well-placed shell, a crash of thunder and a lightning flash

to burl us through the Dark Oates into Eternity. Only let it not be crippling, and vet life!

HOPELESS BUT FEARLESS. "It is like nothing so mucli as a world ending' in earthquake. TV* \vhoh ground trembles so that one is almost hurled upwards, and whoever has lived through this, hour after hour and day. after day, is already in his inmost self half-way to the Other Worid, hopeless hut without fear. And if one survives it one is only astonished still to bo living, and then one hopes that ono may he alive not only to-day but also tomorrow, a week hence, aye, even till the troops go home. "In this battle there are fighting on a narrow front more men than fought all the campaign of 1870. Thereby you may measure in some sort what are the stakes to-day in this most monstrous of all wars, whereof this battle of the Somme is but a little part. There be millions of men who in all their later lives will fear neither death nor devil, for they have, forgotten what fear io."