OUR STUPENDOUS FEAT OF ARMS.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1918, Page 7

OUR STUPENDOUS FEAT OF ARMS.

IN THE CAST SIX MONTHS. London, Nov. 2. Mr. J. A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster Oa/ilte, has just returned from a visit, to the riclges on the Western Front, where the best, of British manhood faces the'world's enemy. He is astounded at wlii't has been achieved and asks himself this question: A QUESTION. "How is it that, so little has been said about the stupendous feat of arms which lias been performed by the liritis'h Army during the last six months? "L.ike everyone else at home I have read and followed on the map the daily communiques, as well as the admirably vivid accounts of incidents in the fighting sent back by the correspondents. I have seen enough as a spectator at close quarters to be able to interpret these | with some sense of their reality. But it was not til] I came o'ut again 1 this year and went over the ground from Coniblcs on the Somme Plateau to the edge of the Wytsehaete Ridge, from which one looks down on the great battle now raging in front of Y.pres, that I could see it as a whole and bejin to measure the achievement of our men.

''The Somme, Vimy, Messines, Wytsehaete, Passchendaele make together a chain of positions of enormous strength —impregnable one would suppose, if the defensive really lias the advantages attributed to it-in modern warfare—and from these we have driven the greatest army in the world, in spite of the favoring conditions which enabled it to concentrate upon this region and to bring reserve after reserve to the defence of all threatened positions.' ''For the space, of fifty miles from south to north it is one immense bat-tle-field, pitted with shell-craters, rent with vast explosions, drenched with blood., stubbornly reclaimed yard by yard by unflinching will and remorseless preparation, from which all the prancing manoeuvres and brilliant surprises' of the old warfare are rigidly excluded. "Here a battle has been fought and won which would have decided any other war in history, and which, even'if the day of decisive battles is over, is week bv week and day by day having an enormous ctl'ect. on this war. If the Ormaiu talk of peace, it they protest that they arc on the defensive, and begin to speak of war as if it were criminal lunacy, it is here fiat) we may look for the cause. German militarism is getting its lesson on these ridges, and the proof that it can be beaten at its own grim game is sinking in."

, ''Tiie word does seanfc justice to some of these positions. Vimy, Messines, Wy Ischaete, are commanding 1 elections of great expanse, big oj)on downs, ■rising to five or six "hundred feet above the plains, and opening up wide views over the flat country. Any tyro can see tlieir strategic value. They are high and dry in this land of swamp and mud; they have direct observation over greater tracts east and wast, they make a natural bastion almost continuous for fifty miles. After coming to see them you will never trouble again about enemy communiques which represent the withdrawal from these pointo of vantage as a voluntary cession of negligible territory. A mere look at the country gives the lie to that| and the stubbornness with which it has been contested tells its own tale. TO (30 BACK.

"So long as they held the ridges the Germans were the secure masters of the invaded territory; as they lose them their position becomes anxious and precarious. In the north, where the offensive is now going on, they cannot repeat their manoeuvre on tlie Somme, and avoid our pressure by going back, for to go back is to uncover the coagt, apd to make the one conspicuous admission of defeat on the Western front which they are struggling their hardest to avoid.

, ''The end is not yet, but from this ridge you can see the beginning of it . . . the great anil abiding impression is that of the enornioi;.. strength of these newly won positions, of the skilful leadership and staff work, and the tenacity and gallntary of all arms which have enabled thein to be captured. More thon ever one feels it to -be the first duty of Government and people to support, Sir Douglas Haig and. his splendid Army in carrying this work to its conclusion."