AT DERNACOURT.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 July 1918, Page 7

AT DERNACOURT.

ALL DAY BATTLE IN THE MIST. .VALOR OP AUSTRALIAN INFANTRY.

I (From Assistant Official War Correspondent, F. M. CUTLACK.) France, April 10. There have been two battles at Dernancourt during the past eight days; the first and less serious engagement on March 28 was more in the nature a trial effort by the enemy against the Australians' position on the hills south-west of Albert; the second, two days ago, was a massed assault, and the story of it is one of those great soldiers' battles which you may find scattered about the wars of British history, a story of the feats of heroic men against tiemendous odds. How great a force lhe Germans threw against our line on Frida.y is not yet known, but they were cei taialy three divisions strong and possibly four; and a line of these battalions held them for half the (lay. It bent, and swayed but never broke'; and when, at the end of the it was reinforced, and the Australians counterattacked, they practically recovered the main line they had held at the beginning. and the enemy was beaten to" a standstill.

It is worth while to describe the ground. The hilly country west and «outh-west of Albert looks down on tne railway and the river Ancre, which curve around it east and south in a perfect boomerang curve. In this valley the village of Buire lies on the right, Dernancourt is at the elbow, and Albert on the left, and Dernancourt is at about the centre of this line. From Buire to Dernancourt the railway runs along, a high embankment, and thenee to Albert there is a series of small banks and cuttings. Several small spurs jut out on to the railway on to the eastern side, separated by fairly narrow gullies; on the south there is a flat, and then a more regular slope up to the Lavieville hilltop. Bonds run down the hill from Lavieville to both Dernancourt and Buire, and the main Albert-Amiens road cut obliquely across and passes T.avieville on the south. Our outpost position lined the railway. The main position encircled the hill,'ronghlv, halfway up the slope.

THE ARTILLERY PREAMBLE. Our line was held on the left by South Australians, together with WesternAustralians, and elsewhere by Queenslanders. They belong to a division with a great fighting name, which it has parried over nearly every field on the British front in France. The morning was mist) and nothing was visible more than three hundred yards away; the latter part of the day was drizzling rain. To that extent our position was deprived of much of its advantage. But there bad been warning of the attack. It was said, indeed, to be one of the areas of a great converging attack on Amiens. At four in the morning the battalions sent back news that there were signs of the enemy massing. They were thick on a road running parallel" beyond the railway on the eastern side, and an officer crawled out with a Lewis gun and fired several drums into' them. Unusual transport and sounds of tramp. ing feet were heart! through the misty darkness beyond Dernaneourt. The Australian gunners opened bursts of fire into those localities, searching and sweeping all the gullies and" road centres, mid these had been well registered beforehand. The little corpse beyond the river, the village of Meaulte and Dernaneourt and Ville-sur-Ancre were raked and splashed with slirapnel and high explosive, and the batteries shot sah os into every shrouded corner where the Boches could hide. For two hours this lasted in heavy bursts of fire, and the enemy, gathering for the storm, must have had much of the heart taken out of him. Then at seven o'clock his bombardment began. It was a terrific welter of shellfire. From seven till nine-thirty he deluged the whole bill with it—every trench and niche on the forward .slopes, where the infantry lay, the villages Sn the rear, smokinj with breakfast fires, and particularly the batteries which had been annoying liiin. Australian officers who had some firsthand yflowjedge gf German bombardments say that it was the worst fire they have had to stand, except the sMlfirc at Pozieres. The Australian field batteries had to stand and serve their guns under the full blast of the stonn, and gallantly they did it. Two support companies behind the centre of the l.ne suffered severely. Eight ma-chino-guns about a quarry just below these companies must have been deluged in the same shellfire—some of them and their crews probably lived to meet the German infantry, but nothing was ever heard of them again. 1

THE CARXAGE ABOVE DERNAXCOURT. Then at about nine-thirty a hurricane fire irom artillery and trench mortar broke over the Australian outpost positions along the whole lino on the eastern side, and at the elbow above Dernancourt, where there is a level crossing, but thickest at that crossing. Signal rockets could not be seen, all telephone linos were long destroyed; there was nothing for it in the front line but to fight tooth and nail, and only a few of the runners got back with messages. On the right flank of the attack the Queenslanders hauled machine-guns over the railway embankment and swept Dernancourt and its exits with a hail of bullets, which made hell of the German's left flank. The road north from the village runs under the railway through a high bridge culvert; two Stokes mortar crews in a little niche in the hillside firwl into the enemy debouching from Dernancourt their whole stock of ammunition—three hundred and seventy rounds—and then destroyed their guns and joined the infantry. Dernancourt became such a charnelhouse that the attack withered away there. But half a mile farther north, at the level crossing, it came on in a mad surging mass. No man can describe tlie slaughter of it. The few Queensland men who came hack snid the enemy dead were in walls, and the mob behind who still came on had to scramble up over (he bloody heaps and there fell dead in (heir turn. Occasionally Australians reached out, and dragged in some of our own rifles and machineguns (captured doubtless in the retreat) which were jerked over the heaps as the Germans fell there. For every four of our men firing there was one down behind loading spare rifles and machineguns as fast as he could do it. At one place the machine-guns were firinj Into the Bodies at ten yard range. At an.-,

other they said they were 400 enemy dead in front of one alone. In the end the enemy broko through—for what were a couple of companies against such hordes?—but there was a full hard, continuous hour of this slaughter before they did.

THE FIGHT UP THE HILLSIDE. The Germans drove straight up the gully and over the spur to the right of it—tha spur on which two German companies had been annihilated to a man, in a minor attack a few days earlier. By reason of the cloaking mist there was little warning for cither, the flank of the other Queenslanders on the embankment by Dernancourt below. The infantry only knew from the sounds in the mist that the machine:gunners fought to the death. And bv about 10.45 the men on the embankment had the Huns right round at the banks. The gallant company had sustained furious minemverfer fire for the last twenty minutes. They swung back from the railway and the bridge to an old hospital on the western side of the Dernancourt gully, where another company came up to reinforce them. The Australian and the German lines then ran up each side of the gully here and the Queenslanders' line on the right bent hack at right angles from the railway half way between Dernancourt and Buire.

Meanwhile, two Held guns the Germans had brought behind their infantry opened fire at point-blank range up the hillside from emplacements mcde of their own Woody masses of ilead at the level crossing. Whi!» the infantry wedge tad been driving in the Queensland right centre the Australians' left centre had also been rolling up in a northerly direction on the other side of the Hun drive. The brave retire-1 ment of the Queenslanders of the left centre inevitably compromised the South Australians further left, who had till this moment—about noon—maintained even their outpost line intact and smashed rush after rush of the enemy from Albert and the wood just south of Albert. The South Australians' position had better advantages than the ground nt the centre, and they made the most of it. They came back only when the enemy were right on the elopes behind them, and they left the road in front of the railway littered with German dead. The stand of their supporting company enabled their right to fall back fighting with extraordinarily few losses, aud their left-most company in the ravine by the Amiens road continued to fight there back to back for hours after the remainder of the line iiad retired, and came in only on direct order to make the line straight for the counter-attack. There are some gallant tales of this company which must be told in another articles.

THE COUNTER-ATTACK OF THE QUEENSLANDERS.

By about three o'clock the line, reinforced by some Victorians and New South Wales men, was reorganised and straightened out on the top of the hill about the Amiens iigh road, and some new Queenslanders 'had come in at the danger point on the right of the Dernaneourt road, facing south-east. This line was about a mile at the greatest depth in the rear of the railway position of the morning. At five fifteen the signal was given, and the whole line, the companies who had been through the fight and the fresh, went forward over the dip of the crest with magnificent enthusiasm. They caught in the flank at its very beginning a new Boche' attack on the Australians, who were entrenched near the hospital, at right angles to the advance. These Germans halted, wavered, and fled without waiting to meet the bayonet. There were some brave German machine-gunners who faced it out as our own machinegunners had in the morning, and who were wiped out. The counter-attack regained the whole of the crest of the hill, but the Germans were in too strong a force to be driven down the forward slopes as well. The Australians entrenched where they were, about two hundred yards in rear of their main front line of the morning, and at the cost of losses which left them beaten to a standstill that was all the Germans won. The exhaustion of the enemy was shown by the fact that the battle died down immediately after our counterattack and the night following was uncannily quiet.