Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 210, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1915 — WAR OF POSITIONS [ARTICLE]

WAR OF POSITIONS

Trench Warfare, Graphically Described by Correspondent. What It Means to Live for Weeks in « Ditch Seeking to Kill Person* in Another Ditch Within Hailing Distance. London. —A British correspondent at the front with the expeditionary force in Flanders sends the following graphic description of life in the trenches: “This war, particularly this trench warfare —‘the war of positions’ as the Germans more correctly call it —is so utterly unprecedented that one often searches the mind in vain for some suitable parallel which will make people realize what it meanß to have to iivrf for days, sometimes for weeks, on end in a narrow ditch seeking to compass the violent death of persons in another ditch within hailing distance with whom not a year ago one might have been lunching or dining. “I was in some trenches the other day. We were having tea round a table in a dugout. The trench' ran through a cornfield, as I remember, and as we drank our tea we had a fine view of some ruined buildings against the sky. The German trenches were very close, and if you had a fancy to finish with life all you had to do was to take two steps from the tea table and poke your head for an instant above the sandbags of the parapet. “On the German side an officer had tried to do this that morning. Five minutes afterwards three men with a stretcher had taken the body awayi Somebody remarked on the strangeness of our position. ‘Here we are,’ he said, ’in a ditch in a cornfield. Rather a good spot for a picnic it would have been, wouldn’t it, with the old farm back there to furnish hot water for tea and this ffice view in front of us? I dare say people used to come here on summer evenings like this a year ago. Yet here we are, a lot of men who probably never heard of Flanders in their lives before this war, living in an adjectival cornfield, with only one idea in life, and that to kill as many as possible of another bufich of fellows living in another corner of the same old cornfield. Funny war, ain’t it? Who’ll come and snipe?’ "He and another man, having finished their tea, went off down the trench where the bullets were whinneylng and popping and snicking great wads out of the sandbags of the parados with a resounding smack that fairly deafens you if your head happens to be alongside. 1 could see them for a bit creeping doubled up along a stretch of low trench marked down as a bad corner. Later I caught sight of them in a ruined barn. They were kneeling motionless with their rifles at an opening. They were waiting. 1 knew whom they wore waiting for, a gentle German whom they had named Peter Weber, a sniper, whose perch was in a tree. They had waited for him for three days. They didn’t get Peter Weber that day. "Men who live like this, almost en tete-a-tete with the .Germans, positively get to know their enemies by sight They give the snipers names and one bears of displays of frightfulness by Karl and Frits and of Hermann’s ‘evening hate.’ " "The other day I was in a position which is less than thirty yards from the German trenches, where the few men holding the place squat doubled up In a narrow trench with a stack of bombs at hand to repelwn attack. The trench nm through some ruined

buildings, where the dead of many months are lying, some buried in the soil through which our trenches run, others entombed beneath piles of loose bricks.. I sat down on the ground beside the rugged Irishmen who were squatted in that foul place and chatted with them. In a piece of mirror stuck up on the parados 1 could see the German trench at a distance considerably less than the width of the Stran<L.at its narrowest point. ‘There’s an Alleman that comes out o’ that trinch one and agin,’ they said to me in hoarse whispers. ‘Sure, and we often see him pattering about, a gran’ big fellow with great whiskers on him. ’Tlb a pity not to shoot him. We could get him every time.’ I touched the mirror to move it The next instant two bullets struck the sandbags on the parados on either side of the glass. The men laughed. ’They can’t hit you the way you have your head now sorr,’ they said, “but don’t be raisin’ yourself.’ ”