MUD IN FLANDERS.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 February 1918, Page 8

MUD IN FLANDERS.

ONE VAST SWAMP. THREE GREAT ARMIES HELD FAST. The mud of Flanders begins at tho sea, where tho trerfches, all ship-shape. confront each other across a No Man's Land—No Man's Lake, rqther—full of wild ducks, observation posts, rat?, drowned Wurtembergers, a tall blue heron sleeping on one leg, and a vast sour smell. All bright and shiny "here the su\ glints on the water, No Man's Land looks in the aeropialle photoj/Mpt..' This :s clir> f><,nt held by the Belgiani and tii ••■ i * ancient ally, the floods. A foot or t've- below sea-level, it >-nm from Nieuport-on-the-Sea, a little less than twenty miles south to Dixmude. Up where the Yser loops furthest east the stagnant waters of No Man's Land—"the haunts of the coot and hern" —are twenty-five hundred yards wide. At Dixmude thtfy narrow to a bare twentyfive yards. ... Couth of Dixrnude, in the British area, the mud of Flanders makes a muck of No Man's Land and a wallow of every attack. SEA OF MUD. i Here the land lies a foot or two above sea-level, rising inland to the merest shoulders of ground, to which the German? withdrew in the "Hindfnburg retreat last April. So the enemy, in many sectors on the Flanders front, untii Kaig's last victory on the Passehcndnele Ridge, still held the positions that were driest. In most of the British "trenches" facing them an entrenching tool would strike water a foot below the surface. Given time, the mud of Flanders sucks slowly dawn from sight all ,the human and mechanical debris of the battlefield, leaving a surface broken only by shellholes, some three feet deep, sonic ten feet, deep, each at least half full of water, and many of thera joined so they form lakes big enough to drown men and horses. It is the same back of the trenches. 'Communication trenches are full of water, and the endless mush of slimy, pitted ground conceals alike dead bodies and nnexplodcd shells Yet every night there is a bedlam of tratfic back to the lines churning up the treacherous surface of this wilderness of lagoons, salt marshes and tlat farm land. . Further south in the Arras region, still in the British area, No Man's Land | lifts to the rolling chalk downs of northwestern France. Here, the dry, 'hard, battlefields are strewn with all the battlefield litter—dried bodies of dead men. broken machine-guns, cartridge clips and cases, empty cigarette boxes, bent helmets, broken wire, papers, and empty bottles and crucifixes, arms and equip- | . u'lit and shell fragments. I GERMANS LOST 120,000 IN MUD. | Much of Flamdcrs was "made" by | harnessing the sea within dykes. And when the sea was harnessed it was harnessed for instant use. In the Germans' first rush for Dunkirk in 1914, the Belgian loosed the good green water on them at Nienport, and when the November high tides sent tile floods flowing through Dixmude, Bixsclioote, and Boesinghe. they backed the Germans away to Ypres, leaving 1-20,000 dead and whole batteries of artillery to sink in the mud and water. Rcmemlier that Flanders is as flat as a floor. At Fumes it is seven feet below sea level ,and its highest elevations are mere shoulders, which, would pass unnoticed except in such a flat plain. 'From the famous bathing beaches of Nieuport, Middlekerke, Mariakerkc, Ostend, and Glakenberghe, back almost to Ypres, Flanders is to-day a swamp, which swallows men and horses and grips three armies in a strange sort of stationary warfare that requires them to waste half their strength in an incessant shoring up and baling out of trenches and communications. In fftet, in some of the wetter portions of this sinking swamp trenches have had to be abandoned and isolated "pill boxes" of concrete substituted.