SHOOTING ON THE DUNES.

Taranaki Daily News, 27 March 1918, Page 6

SHOOTING ON THE DUNES.

NEW ZEALAND ARTILLERY OX THE BELGIAN FRONT. EXPERIENCES IN TEE NIEUPORT SECTOR. By Captain Malcolm Ross (Official War Correspondent with the New Zealand Forces). N.Z. Headquarters, Jan. 9. The artillery of a division is not necessarily all the time with the division to which it belongs. Not unfrequently it goes into a fight before its division, and sometimes it stays in the light some time after the division has been relieved. ■Sometimes, to suit the exigencies of the occasion, a part of it may find itself for a considerable period on a sector far removed from its infantry. At the time it may be advisable that the enemy should not know of such movements. Hence the delay in writing this article. Months have elapsed now since a brigade of New Zealand artillery trekked north towards the dunes at Nieupojc. It was after the affair, when the Germans, making a. sudaen attack along the beach, pushed some of the British troops back across the Yser, and made prisoners of a nunrber of the Australian Tunnellers who were working in • that region. Along the Belgian coast in this piace one came Into a most interesting part j of the battle front. One went Tia La •Panne. La Panne, built as a summer seaside resort right on the dunes, with its "plage*' fronting a shelving beach and a shallow sea, was then untouched, or almost untouched, by shell or bomb. It was a long, straggling, picturesque town, and Housed a considerable civilian population. Once string bands played in the cafes in the evenings, and, on sunny days, the "plage" was a promenade for soldiers and civilians' and well-dressed Belgian, French, and English womc;i ■Some of the English Had been livimj ther n since the beginning of the war. \ Belgian military nospital, stuffed by handsome Belgian nurses in their equally handsome uniforms, was there, and soldiers from the three nations passed Ihrousli the wards. Farther north, along the coast were other seaside resorts, set down in the midst of the waving marram grass of the dunes, the houses greatly shattered by the German shell-lire. Ln lanne, with its bathers —men and women

—reminded you of the pre-war days, when peace and plerty reigned along this eoast. The Belgian soldiers gathered in groups and rings on the sands, playing with great zest ana jollity, their interesting games that were new to us British folk. They were a mdrry crowd with an effervescent and almost juvenile hilarity seldom to be seen in the AngloSaxon. Later came an invasion of British soldiers, the beach was thronged with thousands of bathers, and the Germans in their high-flying planes saw the new invasion. The kilted bandsmen of Highland Regiments plaved their wild tunes, and the Belgians looked and listened in admiration, tinged, peihaps, with some amusement. Amidst the throng in '„V main street and along the "Plage" and in the cafes you marked the tail New Zealanders with their high pointea crowned hats and the* artillery' pugaive. Co:;yde les Bains and Nieuport les Bains, the latter especially, in picturesque ruin, were on the seashore. Aa you went northward you came into the midst of the sights anil sounds of war. That morning an English airman had landed on the beach with his observer dead in the fuselage behind him. They took the body out, covered with the man's tunic, and carried it away on a stretcher to the Belgian Hospital. The pilot set his propeller going again, climbed into his seat, and, rising from the sands llcw along the seashore, and then inland to tell his story at (he aerodrome. The Hermans were crumping the road along which we went with five-nines, which burst with great noise and clouds of smoke and sand We made a slight detour across the dunes oehjnd this shelling, scraps of iron from the'bursting shells falling about us as wc went. It was interesting to note the eli'eet of the shelling on the sands. In the soft Flanders mud that we were so used to the shells buried themselves in the ground before exploding, and the effect was somewhat local. But here the shell bursts the moment it hits the sand, making scarcely any crater, and sending its splinters flying over a wide area. Shellfire in such conditions may bo much more destructive than in the inland war zone. By strange ways that must not be described we made our way right up to the Yser, where the mole ran out to sea, and amongst the beams of which the German snipers secreted themselves to fire on any unwary soldiers who had the temerity to walk along the beach. Lombartzyde, onco on the sea beach, and, farther inland, Nieuport, lay close at hand in front of us, and, at the risk of a crack from a German sniper, you got a good view at close quarters of the enemy lines. The great, swelling dunes rise to heights of about a' hundred feet. It is historic ground. As far back as the ninth century, the Flemish counts had erected a castle to protect themselves against the Normans. In 1489 there was fighting with the French, and in 1600 the historic "Battle of the Dunes," in which the Dutch, led by Maurice of Orange defeated the Spaniards under the Archduke Albert. And now the scene of 010 battles has become the scene of new, and much good blood has been spilt, and many deaths caused, even without the spilling of blood, because of German military inventiveness. It was here that one of the early efforts with a particularly venomous kind of gas. was made by modern disciples of kultur. v It was into this country, not far from here', just after the Lombartzyde reverse, \*nd practically on the three hundred and- seventeenth anniversary of "The Battled the Dunes," that the New Zealanders ctfnus and" planted their guns. The batteries found themselves on virgin ground, and had to build their own gunpits.- Some of them found themselves in a veritable bog, where water was close, to the surface, aud cacli shell-hole soon filled with water. Others, more fortunate, were on the edge of the sanU hills, and so had drier ground. The brigade was under the command of one of our old Gallipoli officers, who did memorable shooting at a critical time at point-blank range in the night time on the Turkißh trenches that were so close to our own, at Quinn's Post. In this new sector there was much work to-do, and at first the German gunners gave them a warm time, with big stuff. Five-point-nines, came over at frequent intervals and then the enemy went on to deal in eight-inch and even eleveninch calibres. They also had-avperience of a fifteen-inch gun, with which the enemy also shelled Dunkerque, fourteen miles behind the New Zealanders, in French territory. Night and day the encinv deluged this area with harassing fire. ' He used a delay-action fuse to

destroy dug-outs and jrmi-pits. On<- day he put in 200 iive-point-nine shells, and wound up the performance with a couple of dozen eleven-incliers, one of which wrecked an ofliccrs' mess and everything about it. Though there were oflicers in the adjoining dug-outs fortunately there were no casualties from this shell. But its hard luck to have your mess blown up. Some of the batteries were knocked out, but the New Zealanders were rather lucky with their men, and during the months they were there the casualties —including those of four English batteries that were with our brigade—were not heavy, especially when one considered the fact that the shells, fitted with an instantaneous fuse, detonated extremely well in the sand, leaving practically no crater and sending the fragments flying over a very wide area. Exactly what damage the New Zealanders inflieted on the enemy it is impossible for me to say, but there can be no doubt that it was not light. At one period the New Zealanders had three days of thunder-storms which flooded the flats and gun-pits, but the gunners remained cheery and worked the guns with their boots on and their nether garments ofl'. This was no doubt not quite according to the book, but it was thought better to keep the clothing dry. During tha time they were in this sector the New Zealand Artillery gained one D.5.0., two military and about a dozen military medals, so it may be judged that they had some serious work to do, and that their services were appreciated.