Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 282, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1916 — BRITISH-FRENCH RIVALRY BRINGS MUTUAL RESPECT [ARTICLE]

BRITISH-FRENCH RIVALRY BRINGS MUTUAL RESPECT

Two Commanders Go Over Parapets Side by Side in Somme Battle. • STORY REPEATED MANY TIMES Old and RecentArrival* From. Great. Britain Look Equally Like Veterans Today—Generous tn Praise of Each Other Are British and French. British Front on the Somme.—-When the big push of the Somme was about to begin and the French and British armies were on the keen edge of expectation. the battalion commander on the extreme right of the British sent word to the battalion commander on the extreme left of the French forces and asked him where he would be in the attack, writes Arno DoschFleurot in the New York World. “I shall be over the parapets with the first wave of my troops,” was the French commander’s reply. f "So shall 1,” was the British commander’s return message; “keep an eye out for me.” So, when the troops were Jammed in the forward trenches waiting for the enormous mine explosions under the German communication trenches, which were to be the signal for the assault, the British commander worked his way to the end of the farthest trench and there he found the French commander. They stood there waiting, side by side, until the terrific explosions tore the German trenches to and the other wtrh "(’barge;" luuped “over the parapets, automatics in handr and led the charge into the German lines. Luckily, both escaped unhurt, and the story of their unusual action has run through the two great allied armies on the Somme. It has gone completely through the British army, in fact, and I first heard it long before I reached the Somme. I heard it so often that I am not sure where I heard it first, but I remember being told it at the table of the divisional commander just south of Ypres, nearly a hundred miles from the Somme. Mutual Good Will. As I kept on hearing this story I began to feel it was a little too pat to be true, but it also struck me that it did not make much difference whether it was or not. Since I have reached the Somme I have had it-con-firmed, but whether it was true or not was nowhere nearly so important as the effect it had upon the troops. It thrilled the allied armies, and gave them a' dramatic example of their brotherhood in arms. Certainly, from the point of view of the British army it has done much toward making them feel good toward the Frenchman fighting beside them. This has interested me, as the relations between the French and the British armies has always-interested me. I know from my own experience With the first British troops that came to France that they had the typical insular attitude of superiority, except in the case of individuals who had seen the French in action and knew at first hand what good soldiers they were. After two years every bit of that is gone. Going about the British front, as I have just been doing, I have been struck, in fact, by the way everyone has made a point of calling attention to the work of the French troops. At most points along the 160-kilometer front the British now hold there were formerly French troops, and the British troops who now occupy these trenches have daily object lessons in , what good soldiers the French must be to do some of the things that are everywhere apparent. Death Toll at Vimy Ridge. I had a striking example of this the Other day when I arrived on the British front. The first place where I approached the firing line was at the Vimy Ridge, north of Arras, a piece of France that has been fought over no less fiercely than the Mort Homme or T.ps Eparges. The fight began at Notre Dame de Lorette, which figured in the French communiques almost daily for months, and as the Germans w’ere pushed out of there by the French poilus they left behind the wreck of Ahlam-St. Nazalre and Souchez before they were forced to the height of Vimy Ridge, which they still held. The little valley in between is soaked with blood. At Notre Danie de Lorette, on a space not over a mile long and 300 yards wide, at least 50,000 men gave up their lives. It is impossible to walk there now without constantly stumbling over boots within which the dry bones rattle in a very ghostly manner. All this magnificent fighting was done by French soldiers, and yet it was the first place to which the British brought me. They have bloody battlefields of their own to show— Ypres, Loos and Neuye Chapelle—but the place they chose showed only what the French had dong. It isrtrue that over on the Vimy Ridge there is a daily battle going on that would be considered Important in any other war, but is never even mentioned in the British communiques. While I wax there the trench mortars >n both

sides were busy and doing harm, too. but no ground was being gained or lost. Generous Praise. Even before we reached the front tire divisional artillery commander, whom we called on as w’e were entering hi* division, told us to take particular note of the excellent French artillery fire, which we would l>e able to see as we advanced over the ground the French had conquered. (Two paragraphs here expunged by the censor.) . Here on the Somme is seen the other side. Small parties of French soldiers frequently pass along the British line, looking over the ground they have gained and with practiced eye, noting the address and courage it took to make these gains. They do DOt MT* much, these visiting French soldiers, largely because they camiQt ..talk with the average British soldier and the average British soldier cannot talk with them, but they look one another over as they go by and the visiting parties confer together, visualizing the course of the various attacks by the trenches and mine craters, and evidently returning to their camps to tell about It. 1-asked a party going th rough here today-what they thought <>f the British advance. One of lliem, a missioned officer, pointed to the complicated series of trenches the British had taken, and to the British front line itself, seven or eight miles away over the captured German trenches, and said: "They could not do more if It were their own country they were reclaiming from the invader.” Up In this part of France one sees very little of the French army nowadays, except for occasional artillery officers and territorial regiments working on the roads. They are keeping the roads in excellent repair, too. AU the front from here to the other side of Ypres is British, and It is ail active, even if one does not hear much except from the Somme. There was a time, when trench warfare was new, when regiments remained opposite each other for months__without serious losses? but~ that is mit true any more." Tlie^lftF 7 velopment of trench bombs and trench mortars has made the mere holding of trenches a costly business. At a number of points along the line where I have touched, the opposing armies were forever blowing each other out. All day they knocked down each other’s defenses and all night they built them up again—a tedious business, and costly in lives as well. On the Vimy Ridge, which I have already mentioned, the Germans hold the crest and the British are immediately under them, never giving them a moment’s rest. The daily casualties on both sides must be considerable, and, as the English seem to be the most active, the Germans must carry away many dead and wounded men every night from that one point—and that is a sector not now spoken of as active. “The Pimple.” Right on the ridge is a slight rise called by the English Tommies “The Pimple," the occasion for that name not being very elegant. It is so called, because, though the British mortars knock It level every day, it rises again every night. It was particularly interesting to me to visit Notre Dame de Lorette. I visited that section eighteen months ago with the French army when the Germans still held the whole district. Then I had been able only to peep out through the trees above at the German trenches. Now I could walk anywhere I liked, with the one danger that the Germans might try shell fire at me. As they have the range of every square yard, they might have tried for the small party of which I was one, but it was not likely. There the depression of war was heavier than anywhere I have ever encountered it. The serried hillsides have grown rankly to weeds, well nourished by the many thousands of dead who He there. It was a place of combat which is to be reckoned with Verdun and the Somme, but the hundreds of connecting trenches are beginning to fall in, and this season the long weeds hide most of them. In the space which lies at every front between the trenches and the arttilery which stands guard over them there is a silence that makes itself felt even in the midst of the constant bombing a mile or so away. The only life is shown by thousands of little birds which rise restlessly and keep dropping back to get the rich seeds from the well fertilized weeds. Bewildered Birds. There are birds also here on the Somme, whole flights of them, no bigger than swallows. I was watching some today under shellfire. They rise and drop in a bewildered way but do not seem to know what to do or where to go. If there is half a minute between shells they turn at once to picking up seeds. In writing about the Somme I find it Is the curious (jetails-jjke this that hold one’s interest at the time. The tremendous drama is'always there bn a scalene can hardly conceive. There is that terrific give and take of shells accompanied by a superhuman coolness of design. The moments when you don’t see destruction right about you It hangs Imminent in the air and keeps you constantly reminded by the shriek of the passing shells and the violent shiver of their arrival.,-An arc of bursting shells with the quick rise of smoke and the rays of the explosion forms a curtain before the enemy, and if you tire of that'you can always look up and watch the British aeroplanes daring the German antiaircraft guns and changing their course every min-

ute to avoid the puffballs of shrapnel that appear in bunches at the spot where they have Just left. In the •hardy wny one has of talking at the front you hear it constantly spoken of ns n “show”—and it is all that. Nothing that could touch it was ever staged. _ ~ . The Somme Battlefield. The appearance of the battlefield Is most remarkable. I have already cabled a description in which I compared it to a cubist painting; nor did that description strain the effect. Just as a picture it is in Itself a strained effect. In a way it reminds one of some of the drawings made of the battlefields of the American Civil war, in the artist tried to show the mass of men on the battlefield, but in the mass they are not like ordinary men. They appear in their very massing to have created something new: Beside me is James H. Hare, the war photographer, suffering for lack of the camera which he was forbidden in this most Intensely interesting spot a photographer could hope to find. But, great photographer as he is, I doubt that his instrument could record that peculiar modern effect oi the battlefield of the Somme. At this stage ofthe war the morale of the meh holds oWs Interest as much as the fight they are making. All about is this new British army, men who nad only vague notions of war two years ago and, until this war broke out, never expected to have a hand in one. Yet here they are as soldierly a lot ns you will find in any army. They look like old soldiers and, in the intensive forcing of new troops this war has caused, they are veterans. - The Australians and Canadians one hears the most about, and, as I saw the Australians and New Zealanders last winter in Egypt just as they came back bored with Gallipoli and eager to get at the Gernlans, I expected to write in particular about them. But now I am here all the troops are so soldierly it would be unfair to distinguish. It is wonderful what has been done with some of the regiments -of—the._most insular and narrow of British- the Midlands. coal miners and plow boys. I cannot tell the regiments of Kent from those of Ulster. Ulster and Dublin. War as a leveler, however, has had Its supreme test here. Some of the Ulster- regiments here found themselves short of officers, I have been told, and it was necessary to supply them with officers from the south of Ireland. There was no objection raised either, and the combination has worked wonderfully well. Surely there could be no greater proof of the dead seriousness of this business than the willingness of Ulster and Dublin men to fight and die together; and when it comes to Ulster men permitting themselves to be led by those from Dublin, the story of the French and British commanders who went over the parapets together is as nothing for dramatic force.