"EFFICACY FIRE."

Taranaki Daily News, 27 March 1917, Page 2

"EFFICACY FIRE."

A VIVID DESCRIPTION. A correspondent with t!ie French arniic.-, thus describes '•efficacy lire,'' the most terrifying incident of 'the modern battlefield:—"One of the German aeroplane scouts wheeling over the French lines must have seen, or thought he saw, movement. Whatever the "reason, the Germans i::ado up their minds that tin- French were brewing something, t-.nd decided to put it to the ordeal known to French gunners as ctlicacy heavily "all day, but at targets far behind the French front. Suddenly, as simultaneously as if a single hand was tiring a') their guns with single motion, a dozen batteries opened upon us. The roar of the first salvo was the only warning. That roar did not die away. It was caught up and magnified a hundredfold as more and -more German guns got to work each firing 'as hard as sweating artillerymen could drive them. The ahull bursts melted into a great sea of. smoke and dying earth. Every yard of ground was topped with its own billow of yellowy white smoke. The ibells, one judged, were mostly of intermediate calibres from the swift, highly unpleasant 130 millimetre gun to the Sin howitzer, For five minutes the raiale lasted, seeming to grpw constantly in intensity, until, as suddenly a; it-began it ceased. During those minutes thousands of projectiles must have buist. The meaning of efficacy fire is that every available gun—sometimes hundreds of pieces swell the chorus of destruction-is turned simultaneously on to a particular spot, with the object of utterly smashing. nlm smothering some movement or workthat is iu progress there. Speed r'nd suddenness and paralysing violence of the firo are essentials of the thin?. It is perhaps the most terrific incident of the modern battlefield. There <an be hardly any experience of war more terrible than to bo caught without a moment s warning under such an avalanche o; destruction. It was a consolation to us, who watched from a place of safety, to remember that the Germans themselves had providod our Poilus plenty of deep shelters in prevision of just such tempests of artillery firo.as the one I have described."