CROWNED WITH VICTORY.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 January 1918, Page 2

CROWNED WITH VICTORY.

FLANDERS «ID f ! 15. [WHAT PASSGTIENDA ELE SIGNIFIES. To keep a sense of proportion in the great events of the day, it is necessary to look not only at the Venetian plains, but also at the hills of Flanders, whose summits are crowned with victory. The Germans have captured hundreds of thousands of Italians. On the Flanders hills Jhe Germans have lost over a hundred thousand men, whose lives were given tot prevent the victory which has now been achieved and which is denoted by the capture of Passchendaele. "Passchendaele," says Mr. Philip Gibbs, "is the crown and crest of the ridge which made a great barrier round the salient of Ypres and hemmed us in the flats and swamps. After a heroic attack by the Canadians, they fought their way over the ruins of Passchendaele and into ground "beyond it. ' "The Canadians ..ve had more luck than the F<nglish, New Zealand', and Australian troops, who fought the battles oh the way uj> witli most heroic endeavor, and not a man in the Army will begrudge them the honor which they have gained, not easily, not without the usual price of victory, which is some men's degth and many men's pain." "The capture if Passchendaele," says The Times correspondent, "is the culmination and final triumph of the long series of final hammer-drives, of which this was the eighth, by which we have forced our way along the ridge since the recommencement of operations here on September '2O. The honor of delivering this last blow was given to the Canadians, and no troops could have done it better

SYMBOL OF GREAT THINGS. "Passchendaele wis a little place at best, aS? now is almost nothing but some few heaps of ragged ruins and concreted cellars. But.it is the symbol of great things. Hindenburg's order to hold or retake it'shows that. With it we have the high ground of the whole main ridge. "All our men to whom I spoke testified to the admirable work of our artillery,' and every man of them, however badly wounded,»laughed and crowed with elation of a victory well won. "One young lieutenant (a German prisoner), in a torn tunic and trousers, but still gloved and stiffly polite, said that the British barrage was "quite stupendous.' 'This opinion is corroborated by the Canadians," says the Morning Post. "All the men I talked with dc?!ared that they had never attacked—at >ns, Vimv. or elsewhere—behind a better screen'of shell, iter... laid or maninilatd." V "It has taken us eight bites to gain ibout* as many thousand yards' depth of rround," says Beuter's correspondent. "It la's probably cost the Germans a hundred ;honsand casualties at least to try and •esist this inroad into their most powerful system of defences. To-day's battle. !>a? resulted in another considerable stride in - that direction; and has been grained, I hear, at the cost of a comparatively light casualty list."^ •'Passcliendaelc is an epic of mud ni l heroism from men in waist-deep mud and water of front line to the lorry transport drivers who have kept the Army fed_ and munitioned," says Mr. W. A, Willison, the Canadian correspondent at the.front"The struggle before Passchendaele has Jeveloped into one of the bitterest battles in the whole history of the Canadian forces.

AN EPIC OF MOT)".. /hat is Passchendaele?" asks Mr. Philip Gibbs in a splendid dispatch to the Dally Chronicle. As I siiw it this morning, through th.e smoke of gunfire ...ul a wet mist, it ",vas less than I bad seen before a week or two ago, with just one ruin there—the ruin of Its church—a slack mass .of slaughtered masonry and jothing else; not a house left standing, lot a huddle of brick on that shell-swept ieight. But. because of its position as ,lio ciwvn of the ridge, thai crest lias .oemed to many men like a prize to which Ul these battles o* Flandc have been fought, and to get tins place an" the dopes and ridges on the wav to it, not only or its own sake, but for what it would bring with it, numbers of our most gallant men have given their blood, and thousands—scores of thousands —of British soldiers of our own home stock rom overseas have gone through fire and water, the fire of frightful bombardments, the water of the swamp: of the becks find ■'shell-holes, into which they have plunged and waded aid stuck—and sometimes drowned. .

TO DEFEND THAT RIDGE. "To defend this ridge and Passchendaele,and the crest of it, the enemy has' massed great numbers of guns and in- v credible numbers of machine-guns, and jnmny of his finest divisions. To check our progress he devised new systems of defence, and built his concrete • block- 1 hflieijses in echelon formation, and at every cross-road and in every bit of village ov instead, and our men had to attack .thijt chain of forts through Its girdles of machine-gun fire, and., after a groat- price of life, mastered it.' The weather fought for the encinv on the days of our attack, and the horrors of the mud and bogs in this great desolation of craterland miles deep—eight miles deep—over a wide sweep of country, belongs to the gr ; mmest remembrances of every soldier who has fought in this battle of Flanders.

SPENT HIS MAN-POWER. "The enemy may brush aside our .advances as the taking of a lhud patch, but to-resist it he has at one time or another put 'nearly a hundred divisions into the ■irena of blood, and the defence has cost him a vast sum of loss-in dead and wounded, I saw his dead in Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, and over all this ground the young manhood of Germany has spent itself. "It was not for worthless ground that so many of them died and suffered great agonies and fought desperately, and came brick again and again in massed counterattacks, swept to pieces by our guns and f.nr rifle fire. Passchendaele is but a pinprick on a fair-sized map, but- so that we should not take it the enemy bad jpent much of his man-power and his gun-power without stint, and there has liowed up to his guns tides df shells almost as great as the tides that flowed up to oiir guns, and throughout these months lie has never censed by day or night to pour out, hurricanes of fire "over all these fields in the hope of smashing up our progress. "Our airmen were masters of the sky," savs the 'Morning Post correspondent. "They swarmed above the German lines, noting every movement and attacking troops wittf their ibombs and machineguns; at times the' heavens seamed to be covered with' British 'planes, sailing serenely through the gusts of smoke. | "I think I have found a reason for the reported precipitate retirement of tha PiUßsiaus from Passchendaele in the ol>

servation of one prisoner. He said: 'We do not like the Canadians; the Germans think they are very desperate men.' THEY REST CONTENT TO-DAY. "Two and a-half years have passed since I first talked .with Canadian soldiers toy Ypres. Few of the men who came back this morning were in that historic retreat, when tlio flower of the German Emperor's legions drove o«r tliin battle front below the slopes we hold to-dav, Yet they have not forgotten the stand of that first heroic little band of "Britons from the 'Dominion who came back lighting doggedly every step of tlieir reluctant journey, pressed bv the most formidable aj'my the world had ever seen, beaten but»not dismayed. "There are. Canadian graves 011 the plain of Ypres; 1 saw their weatherbeaten crosses this morning. ]f the men ,vho sleep there .knew anything of this great struggle they must rest content today."