BIG GUNS AT YPRES.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 January 1918, Page 6

BIG GUNS AT YPRES.

CLOCK-LIKE REGULARITY. AXZACS GO THROUGH BARRAGE. / From Mr C. E. W. Bcft.ii, Official Press Representative with the Australian Imperial Forces.) BRITISH HEADQUARTERS. France. "Clock-work, ' said the Battery Major, as he looked around. The end of the first exhausting task of the field guns had come. It was the moment to limber lip and dash to a forward position behind the infantry. The last round was fired. The whistle went. And there, waiting quietly under the lemains ot a certain battered hedge, were the teams arrived a few moments before from their lines far in the rear, •vl 're day after day they had waited for this instant Ten minutes later the batteries were all drawn up waiting the word. The sams battery major was standing with the commander of the historic brigade. "We are waiting for your guns, now, Colonel," he said. "I hope my fellows will be up to time," muttered the colonel, looking at his watch. The major looked up. "Here (hey come," he said. Over the brow of the hill were coming the Horses of the leading team. They filed past the waiting batteries of the other brigade—never did batteries lool: better than these Australian units in the thiok of this latest great battle of Flanders. The waiting batteries fell into line behind them, and the column wound its way over the misty low lands towards positions where for nearly three long years the green flats had been gradually torn into crater fields, and where through all that time until this morning no man nor body of men dared to move openly. FIRST HINT OF TROUBLE. Far ahead, over' the last rise on the route, where the battery commanders were out on the scattered country selecting the exact positions where each battery as it arrived should go, there was some hint that matters would not always proceed so smoothly. The country was full of movement. Infantry columns advancing; lines of men moving up the farther ridge; tanks crawling forward on their bellies in the mud; parties of German prisoners coming back. Occasionally streams of machinegun bullets whistled past. One party of infantrymen appeared to take cover from them behind shell craters. 11l passing those men the reconnoitring artillery officers found that they were not sheltering. Evidently there were German machine-guns still unsuppressed somewhere in the landscape, which were turning from one group of men to another. Two artillery officers watched the scene from a trench, when one of them fell across his friend with a bullet through his head. Presently into that somewhat awkward situation, over the rest of the ridge belling came the leading teams of the Australian guns. Now it was clear that something in this part had temporarily held up the programme. The Germans somewhere held a point irom which they could see that column pass the crest. At once the lighter German shells began to fall around them. Far out with the infantry the artillery's own forward observation officer, looking back at that moment, saw the column coming over the slope—just as the Germans must have seen it—and saw that barrage begin to fall. As the information of it spread around among the German batteries concerned, one. after another switched its fire oil that point, until the shells fell around them as fast as one could throw tennis balls from a basket. Away on the flank the barrage was beginning to fall on certain British batteries.

INTO THE BARRAGE The barrage wsa there, and the men had simply to go into it, which they did without an instant's hesitation. The column for the first time broke into a (rot. The drivers of the leading batteries getting well ahead toward their position, flogged their sweating horses into, and out of, and between and over iihell-holes, driving as they had never driven before, almost lifting their horses by their exertions. Battery after battery found its exact site. The ammunition was dumped—the limbers cleared back over the ridge. One battery near the crest struck trouble. One of its guns sidled into a shell-hole, and no amount of flogging and driving could for the moment clear it. The team behind it was waiting, when a five point nine high explosive shell plunged into its midst and burst, killing 91- wounding every horse. Some Australian artist will yet paint the battle picture as it stood at that moment. The batteries in the lower ground ahead steadily firing up the ragged slope to the horizon; a battery in the foreground working its guns amidst the uplash of frequent black bursts.

! PAST THE AEROPLANES The.limbers were just clear away to the rear, and the guns had picked up their task and were working steadily ahead with it, with shells falling thickly around them, and the air full of whirling fragments, when there was the burr of a motor overhead, and looking up they saw an aeroplane wheeling below the low cloud not (100 feet above. It had black German crosses painted beneath its planes. As it wheeled over the batteries they could clearly see the airman, and the bombs, as one after another five or six of them dropped from the machine. They exploded harmlessly; other aeroplanes were most of the day flying and wheeling overhead—so many machines and so cramped beneath the cloud that their attention seemed to be occupied with endless wheeling, like tharof a flight of great birds, to avoid colliding with others. The 'planes could scarcely tell English from German; most of them were English, but during the day six times some German aeroplanes in that collection came swooping down over the gun crews who were shooting back with a couple of salvaged machine-guns and some rifles picked up from the trenches. "Tliey came at us with everything but submarines," as one officer said afterwards.