THE FLANDERS MUD.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 November 1917, Page 7

THE FLANDERS MUD.

WHAT IT MEANS TO OUR TROOPS. Writing from War Correspondents' Headquarters, France, last month, Mr. Ihilip Gibbn said:— Active warfare is for the moment much impeded in Flanders by the wet weather It is a queer thing that modern armies are more hampered by rain and the state of the ground than troops m the old di'ya. All our wonderful weapons, all our 'progress in engineering science, and our conquest of the air are sensitive to a few heavy showers with mist and mud. Tlje reason is clear enough, as one sees it out here. Modern artillery so rake 3 up the earth which infantry' has ,to attack that after even moderate rains it becomes a gliitinous slime between ponds formed by linked shell craters, and the best troops in the world can 'onlv make slow headway through it. The guns become hard to move. It' is difficult to get ip supplies. Bombs and rifles are liable to be choked with mud, and aeroplanes often cannot see, so that the artillery have trouble in finding new targets. Light signals do not shine through tl'p mist, and in some places men can hardly follow a barrage quick enough t« keep pace with it: It is the same for the enemy as for us, and a little worse, because they fear attack, and live in the continual agony of nervous tension under greater shell fire, which does not cease though the infantry l\ave scarcely anywhere! moved beyond their lines for the- pa-two days. Hut for all our fighting men this weather—breaking up the summer too soon, and bribing a foretaste of the discomfits and beastliness of the long wet month 3 of Flemish winter—is a disappointing and tragic thing. •They make the best of it, as our soldiers have made the best of all the conditions in which they have lived even in the worst of times, and as they go marching along the roads toward? the lines with the rain dripping from their steel helmets and their long macintosh capes one hears them whistling on the way, ")iile far ahead, in a long column [which ends with the stretcher-bearers and the transport and the travelling cookers with black smoke a-trail from the slanted chimneys, the band plays a ragtime march as if a war wwe the jolliest old game of life, with no grim death for anybody at the journey's end. Up in the advanced posts in the country of the pilUb!-—»s some of these . of ours sit behind a bit of cover in the mud, hunched up so that their steel hats act as umbrellas for their noses, smo'ifing stinkers which they keep dry if they can under their capes, and watching the frizzling of some mutton chops which have come up in the wonderful old way, with damp letters from home and a new supply, of bombs. In- the samo way, not seeming to bother at all about the noises overhead or some fifty yards away, whore a bit of ruin collapses into a flatter rubbish heap after an explosive force; has hit it : 'some of our men sit in the ahells of houses long since gutted by the bombardment, and get a little shelter from the uriri by smuggling close to their broken walls, and watch the puddles creeping closer to their little islands of dryness, and discuss anything except the war with the pal whose shoulder is nearest to theirs. So I saw them yesterday, patient and imperturbable through all this filth and' discomfort and danger.