With Our Soldiers in France | Page 3

English battalions as they advanced. As the men came forward, the barrage was lifted step by step and dropped just ahead of them, to pulverize the enemy and protect the British troops. By five o'clock Messines itself was captured by the fearless Australians. There was a most desperate struggle just here where we were standing at Wytschaete. All morning the battle raged along this line, but by midday it was in the hands of the dashing Irish division. Seven thousand prisoners were taken, while the British casualties, owing to the effective protection of their terrific barrage, were far less than the German and only one-fifth of what they had calculated as necessary to take this strategic position.
We make our way up to the crest of the Messines ridge where we can look back on the conquered territory and forward to the new lines. The great guns are in action all about us. They are again wearing down the enemy in preparation for the next advance. For the moment we feel only the grand and awful throb of vast titanic forces in terrible conflict. Day and night, in the air, on the earth, and beneath it, the war is slowly or swiftly being waged. The fire of battle smolders or leaps into flames or vast explosions, but never goes out.
Above us the very air is full of conflict. Hanging several hundred feet high are half a dozen huge fixed kite-balloons, with their occupants busily observing, sketching, mapping, or reporting the enemy's movements. Each of these is a target for the attacking aeroplanes and the occupants must be ready, at a moment's notice, to leap into a parachute when they are shot down. High above these balloons a score of British planes are darting about or dashing over the enemy's lines, acting as the eyes of the huge guns hidden away behind us. We are looking at one far up seemingly soaring in peace like a graceful bird poised in the air, when suddenly we see it surrounded by a dozen little white patches of smoke which show that it has come within range of the enemy's anti-aircraft guns and the clouds of shrapnel are bursting about it. Most of them break wide of the mark and it sails on unscathed over the enemy's lines. Just above us is hanging a German taube, obviously watching us and the automobile which we had left below in the road, while the British huge anti-aircraft guns near by are feeling for it, shot after shot.
We duck into our little Y M C A dugout, just under the crest of the ridge. It is an old, deserted German pit for deadly gas shells, which even now are lying about uncomfortably near, in heaps still unexploded. Here the men going to and from the trenches, come in for hot tea or coffee and refreshments night and day. A significant sign forbids more than thirty men to congregate at once in this exposed spot, as sometimes these Y M C A dugouts are blown to atoms by a shell. The one down below in "Plug Street" has been blown to bits, and the man in the one just up the line has been under such fire for several days that he will have to abandon his dugout.
Just in front of us over the ridge is the first line of the present British front. There is no time to build trenches now or to dig themselves in. They just hold the broken line of unconnected shell holes, or swarm in the great craters which are held by rapid fire machine guns. The men go out by night to relieve those who have been holding the ground during the previous day. It is harder for the enemy's artillery to locate and destroy men scattered in these irregular holes and craters than if they were in a clear line of trenches. The British front faces down the slope toward the bristling German lines, dotted with hidden snipers and studded with sputtering machine guns. As the evening falls the batteries behind and all about us open fire. Flash after flash of spurting flame leaps out from the great guns. Boom upon boom, deep voiced and varied, follows from the many calibred guns in the darkness, till the night is lurid and the ground beneath us quivers with the earthquake of bombardment.
High above we hear the piercing shriek of the shells speeding to their fatal mark, and below the crash of the exploding shells of the enemy, which toss the earth in dark waves into the air in the black surf of war. Gun after gun now joins the great chorus, swelling and falling in a hideous symphony of discordant sounds. The whole horizon is lit up and aflame. The sky quivers and