WINTER ON THE SOMME.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1917, Page 8

WINTER ON THE SOMME.

MUD I>KALL DIRECTIONS. EXTREMES OF HARDSHIP. Writing of the winter conditions on the Somme, Captain Bean, the Australian war correspondent says: I personally do not know how Che men and thei? officers lived through the sort of conditions endured this winter. Take the hardest man you know; take him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain with—on his back —all the clothing, household furniture, utensils, and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees—sometimes up to his waist—along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken treestumps and endless shell-holes—hole* into which, if a man were to fall, he might even lie for days before he were 'found, or might never be found at all; at the end of it all. trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out of the putty-like mud, into k shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks, except that there is no grass about if, nothing but brown slippery mud on tht floor and trenches sines and over tin. country in all directions as fiu 1 as the eye can see. At the end of all put him to live there, with what baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various depths of mud to stay there all day in rain, wind fog, bail, snow-stormsVwhatever weathercomes—and to watch there during the endless winter nights, whcii the longedfor dawn only means another day anu another night out there in the mud ditcli without a shred of cover whatsoever. ' The longed-for relief came at last—a change to other shell-shattered areas in support or reserve—and the battalion comes back down the long road to the rear, dragging foot after foot slowly through the mud, for they had been through a life which you, or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South Polar expedition is a dance aiA. a picnic. And that is. without taking into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme, where "there conditions existed, men lived under the unceasing sound of guns. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. There has never been anything to approach it except at Verdun. Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more settled parts of the front b» t after the Somme one found oneself looking on it, in the term of the friend who went with me, as "War de Luxe." It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all places indeed of anything except what lie personally sees and knows at the moment. The conditions which I have described, anil "what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, I personally know that English troops, Scottish troops and Australian troops went through them, and have in some cases issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of tlieni. Our troops | are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the nature of war to fma ' yourself plunged into extremes ot exertion and hardship without warning, aim no man knows when he writes to-day-and I doubt whether any of his superiors could tell him—whether lie will at any given date be in .a worse condition or a better one.