IN GREVILLERS.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 May 1917, Page 6

IN GREVILLERS.

L 7;. SECOND STAGE OP ADVANCE. - ; WHERE AUSTRALIANS ARE l FIGHTING, COUNTRY OF INTENSE INTEREST. (From C. E. W. Bean, Australian War Correspondent)'. ■ British Headquarters, France, March 10. Three days ago the German forces opposing -the Australian and British line upon the Somme battlefield again withdrew. This makes the second stage in the: German retirement. It seenw to have been carried out earlier than was intended. If so, this was because the h>avy artillery fire on the south side of Louport Wood, where the Australians had pressed up to within a few hundred yaj-ds of the main German position, made the German certain that an attack on his flank there was imminent. And If that attack were made, and succeeded it would have placed this portion of his force in a position nothing short of perilous. He withdrew from this line at dusk on March 12. Within three hom= after he left them Victorian troops werp. in his trenches below Grevillers. And during the day before yesterday their posts were pushed ojrt«bcyond the village of Grevillers itself/ Yesterday three of us took the most interesting walk, I think, that I have ever taken in my life. During the early and appalling months of the Somme winter you had to drag through three or four miles of continuous, deep, glutinous mud to reach the front line. Battalions going in and coining out arrived at the end of their journey in a state of weariness such as I have never seen on men before. But after a few weeks'of this, narrow wooden paths made of planks similar . to those of a gangway and known as duck hoards, began to be Jaid over the mud, and by Christmas time these had '. spread all over the district like arteries. Tens of miles of them. We drove to \ the duckboard walk at '.Swansea Circus," where in the winter Australian police- , men used to direct the traffic under ; German shellfire, and went alaong it ; to a certain gullyside of evil reputation not fir from the ruined village of FJers—known as Factory Corner. Factory Corner was some old agricultural factory in the bottom of a country gully. It was a heap of bricks and rusty iron when the New Zealanders took it in [ September. All through the winter ; the Germans shelled this corner until there was no unshelled yard of ground on any side of it. It was almost as : heavily shelled as the ground behind thqfc' own lines. GUEDECOURT. From Factory Corner w& struck right ■ across the valley to Geudecourt. We wanted to see Geudecourt because for some reason the Germans shelled the remains of it heavily during the whole winter. It was easily the most frequently shelled place in our lines during the winter. When wo came' into the Somme again in October, Le Sars and Flers had the reputation of being most unhealthy corners. But to anyone who knew Pozieres they were child's play. There are quite respectable ruins left in each of them after six months' sheling. There was nothing left of Pozieres after one month. But Geudecourt was different. That Germans rarely teft the place- alone night or day for a single hour. That was why we wished to see it. It is the only place which I have seen that looks in any degree like (Pozieres as we knew it. There is one stump of a wall, or perhaps two. There is a mo'.'nd of fine brick dust, which once was a church. The rest is the nliorf stumps of trees and wilderness of black hollows filled with the pounded grey debris of shattered roofbeams. There is more of it left than there was of Pozieres—but it would not be worth J arguing,, about, anyway. They were . even shelling ole end of the place still. j Why they so shelled Geudecourt is a , mystery, and always will be. ; THE GERMAN LINES. From there we walked down to the strange steep banked sunken road known to us as "Fritz's Folly"—which I once described under the name of the "Green f Bank." It was a meeting-place of two ;, Oi his front-line trenches—fire trench r and bayonet trench—behind a steep road 1 cutting through the foot of the hill. The i British, and afterwards the Australians, a several times attacked this knotty point ■* each time in high hopes. But the " Somme mud beat them. The Germans saw them coming, and the brave waves only just lapped over into his position in a few isolated driblets were easily wiped out. In the end, at a time when it was k easier to Ipso your way than find it in jj this wilderness of Somme mud, a messenj ger with some of our arrangements for I assault, missed his turning, and wandered into the German lines; and about the same time a German with some, of their counterplans missed his turnings and wandered into ours—and the Ger'i mans evacuated the place and we took y it without falling into the trap they I I had laid. ® That will show what sort of a battlefield these Australians were braving during the winter. e We /followed along the bayonet trench as it wandered across the mud- , to start burying the men who lay there t by the German* wire, and in No man's Land—lay very close to tho trench. The Germans had not even troubled to bury - their own dead, which lay behind their trench —not in front of it—they seemed wioßs.vH poaH nsga iETH Oa to ,have pitched them out over the parapet without troubling their heads further. There they lay among the broken bottles and old tins which marked the ground at the rear of this'' trench along its whole length. The Germans bring mineral waters into the trenches with them, and the parados of this trench aas it wandered across the mudflats was marked by an endless ribbon of these bottles thrown out of the trench. And they were mud-flats with a vengeance. Our artillery would cover e.very square inch of them during the winter with shell. Beyond them, where they abruptly ended in a steep chalk bank, was the German second line trench—Rye trench—moderately high and dry on the hank top. But the stretch of flats below was simply a maze of waterlogged shellcraters. Here or there were the timbers of an old German gun position blown in. the beams sticking up like dishevelled pins. We picked our way cautiously 'around the edge of deep mud-holes to Lusienhof farm—that is to say the foundation of it, and a recognisable hedge. It was a small German headquarters, the working rooms, of course, being dugouts deep below; and the farm foundations were heaped with ungainly lumps of earth dug out from the interI for. The German* blew a % crater io

in the rood here in the scare after tie British tank attsftk, but the mine was not well sited, and the huge crater was by the roadside. 'From Lusinhof we took the road across the flats to the villages taken by the Australians in February—Ligny. Le Barque and Thilloy. THE GREEN GRASS AGAIN, As we walked this road towards • Ligny across tha flat and nearcd the opposite slope, we drew quite suddenly clear of the filth which covers seven or jig'ht miles of battlefield more or less, and out into a shallow chalk cutting through almost green fields. Exactly fourteen hundred yards away on our right, in full view, was the first main German trench, still held by them, You could see the rusty wire liko brown gorse winding over the hill and the chalk parapets behind it. At eleven hundred yards the cutting hid us from )t. At our feet was another crater in the crossroads, blown a few weeks back. By our side was a German notice "Road to Beaulencourt—town major next tiie church." We had just passed it when there was a rushing through the sky, and great pieces of Ligny and Le Bargue and Thilloy seemed to be thrown about our ears. For some reason tho Germans suddenly flung heavy shells into the place at the rate of about twenty in tho minute —Sin and -5.9 in pounding with a heart-satisfying bang into the heart of the village. We withdrew slightly, as the communiques say, and watched the spectacle from a road-side, as you would a show. When pieces of tree root had ceased to turn circles in the air we turned down the main street of Ligny towards Le Barque. The houses are three-quarter shatter- ' cd here, and they look out through a fairly skinny patch of wood. But there ' is cnon£ both of houses and wood left '. to make the fighting of the last fortnight something like village fighting; machine-guns had fired from the houses on our right against Australians attacking through the trees' There were whole walls and roofs still in position. .We struck across from a field where the Tasmanians bad lain on their stomachs and bombed the Germans behind the road-bank fifteen yards away, and made along the lane where those Germans were killed as they fled; a double line of trees ranged up the hill across our path. A minute' later we found ourselves upon the Bapaume road. THE BAPAUME ROAD. U is a double row of trees running straight as a ruled line fwin une horizon to the other. Miles back it runs through Pozieres and Albert. Then through Le Sars and past the Butte. And here we were on it about three kilometres from Bapaume. By the side of us was the old German railway running down the road. A little behind us some last German train had been cut off by shellfire —and there were the trucks , lying at angles on the rails, trucks from Madgeburg and Essen. Across ti>e road was a blow up culvert "%nd further a second mine crater. Wo walked uphill ; until we looked down a long straight vista, near the end of which the German outposts and ours must have been facing one another across the road; then we cut straight across the grass to our left towards Grevillers. It was. green grass compared to any we had seen on the Somme field. Half of it was very big new shell holes, but they were clean-cut and fresh, and as we walked a solitary German gun was banging about twice a minute into a small scrub-patch a few hundred yards to our right. I do not know what they had found there, but they certainly thought they had found something. A couple of men hopped across the skyline quickly —the guns put four shells in within a few seconds as they skipped. An hour later, as wc passed the place the same . gun was still pecking twice a minute at exactly the same spot. , THE FRONT LINE. ' We crossed the excellent little trench , dug by our own troops the week before, and the great square mud trenches of tlie German main line protecting Loupart wood. They wcro great, deep, square trenches, with dugouts, but no other woodwork or improvement, and half water-logged. The wire in front of 1 Loupart wood consisted of two entingle--1 ajents on stakes before the second ■ trench and five before the front trench. 1 Two on stakes, one on huge steel knife ' rests, a fourth on stakes, and a iiftli on ' knife rests, and they were still adding to it when they retired. We walked up a muddy lane into a ! grove behind Grevillers—an old qnaTry. I long since grass-grown, with tall trees . springing from the depths. All round ! it, like the boxes of a theatre, the Germans had built dug-outs, and, having left them,, they had spent this afteri noon in shelling them with very big ! shells. It was the least,broken village and • the best woodland that we ..had seen. There wore still unbroken roofs and , some whole rooms. German shells had 1 that day been pounding into tii<» deserti ec! place. Wc moved up past the deserted ponds and into the country bey<ms, : and hesitated at a corner where a lac? ■ ran away into the fields. We wire not sure whether to turn up thafiSfane—we saw some men in another direction. ■ Another man was walking quickly round a hedge corner towards them. We step- ; pod over there, too. They were the men we had come to see. 1 They were the front-line conipany. i Five hundred and fifty yards down that 1 quiet lane, which still had branches and.. ' twigs enough in its hedges to suggest an English lane, was tho main German ■ trench, still held by Germans. These outposts were living here, within shout 1 of it, something like their ordinary Aus- ; tralian life. There had been a, Ileal of 1 sniping, the Germans were throwing high explosives, softly-falling pineapple bombs all day—the ugly little dry pits 1 of the explosion were obvious all along 1 the road. He had lathered the place with heavy shell in the midday. And they were living at the cutting edge to it, going and coming on their messages ■ quietly and promptly; sending their patrols regularly out through the unknown and back—one of a patrol had just been hit in the last half-hour. They knew they were doing country's 1 work, and doing it outstandingly well, ! and what pleased them more than any- ; thing was to think that away back home in Australia people will be pleased and ' proud of them. They were Victorians 1 and New South Welshmen in • that vil- ' lagc. Dusk was falling as we left them. ; Within a few hours they were fighting the German in his trenches, and before dawn he came out at them, and had been driven off. 1 That is all in the night's work.