Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 206, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 September 1917 — HUSHING SHELLS TO RATTLE FRONT NO SLACKER’S JOB [ARTICLE]

HUSHING SHELLS TO RATTLE FRONT NO SLACKER’S JOB

When Word Comes Men Behind Lines Work With Desperate Speed.

DELAY MAY MEAN DEFEAT

Road Builders Who Follow Fighting Ranks Taxed to the Utmost—Motor Lorries Play an Important Part In the Work. By F. W. WARD. (In the New York Tribune.) London. —To render an advance posr sible and to insure that everything shall be kept up to date behind the line is no small order. There is no time for sitting down and thinking things over. If anything has to be done it has to be done at once. A few hours’ delay might be very convenient to the organizer, but such delay would probably vitiate any plans he might make. That is why, when anything has to be done in the matter of repairs and rearrangements behind the line it has to be done at top speed. There are no “hours" in the army. If a job has to be rushed, then everybody buckles to the task and keeps on slogging until the job is finished. Tommy may grouse—he wouldn’t be much good if he didn’t —but he gets away with the job when he knows it is important Once a job had to be done at a spot where the Huns had been shelling for three solid days. It was just the removal of stores, and all the spare R. A. M. C. and A. S. C. men had been pressed into the service on this particular occasion. It was carried through at night, naturally, and there were no lights to be shown. The party would have been blown out of the earth if there had been any indication of their presence.

It wasn’t an easy job. In fact, it was real hard work, the loading up of lorries, wagons, anything that could be got in the way of wheeled transport. “Now, then, you chaps,” said the officer -in charge, “I don’t know who you are or where you come from. But we’ve got to get this job done in about three hours. If we don’t we shall be shelled to h at daylight.” There was some cheerful growling, but the job was done well under the time, and a dixie of tea at the finish put every one in a thoroughly good humor. Motor Lorries Used. This was only a small job, “somewhere in France,” but it was typical of an infinite number. As things are now, there are plenty of stores and material to do practically any job, but of necessity they are not as a rule on the spot, where they are actually required. Rail heads and engineer dumps cannot be carried forward on the very heels of the advance. That can be easily understood. But when something has to be ddne in a hurry, these materials can be brought up by means of motor lorried, with an A. S. C. driver at the wheel and an engineer officer in charge.

Ammunition dumps, with their millions of shells, have to be built so as to be within easy reach of the transport. But other roads have to be made, leading through the dump from the main route. This is necessary in order that a lorry may be brought in and loaded or unloaded from either side. These roads are of the corduroy variety, a floor of pit props being laid and made secure, for the time being. But when it does rain in France —well, you know all about it. It isn’t long before the logs begin to sag, as the water gets into the ground beneath, and the first thing you know is that a lorry dips down at an awkward angle, one of the wheels disappears up to the axle, and the logs splay out in all directions. That’s where the rush begins. A strong pull and a long pull gets the lorry out of the way, up come the loose logs, the ground beneath is made up with brushwood or short lengths of timber, well pegged down, the surface is relald, and a couple of hours later things are going on well again. Perhaps, though, there are not enough pit props available. Round rushes an officer, gets a chit from the office of the chief engineer of the army corps operating there, hops on a lorry, and away he pelts to the nearest rail head or dump. The chit is handed in to the officer in charge there, the necessary material is issued and loaded, back goes the lorry again, and the job is done. Perhaps a road is under water. Well, iron pipes are necessary to take

the surplus from one side of the highway to a ditch on the other, and iron pipes have to be found. They do not grow on the bushes by the side of the road. They are stacked perhaps milei* away on a dump, and they have to be brought up. Then, and not till then, the work can, be done, and the route released for traffic again. Even steam rollers have to be considered, for a steam roller has a soul, and has to be humored. The first steam roller I saw in France came from a London suburb, and she was resting in a ditch. The next I saw was one from the county council of a southern county. She was in a ditch, too. Both were got out, of course, but the edge of a road in France has an uncanny habit of breaking away, and then the trouble begins. One roller I knew was the most perverse creature I ever met. She made a start by blowing out the plug of her boiler and had to be assisted from a small river twice by means of a couple of “caterpillar” tractors. Then, suddenly, she appeared to change her mind, and when I heard of her lasi was working as though she were at home. She had to be kept at work; too, and her repairs had also to b«» rushed. When the plug blew out, for Instance, an officer who happened t«/ come along tookra couple of men round' to a French blacksmith’s shop, found some lead, made the repairs there and then, paid half a franc out of his own pocket and wasted only a few hours over the task Instead of a couple of days. Economy of time means everything, and an hour saved means an hour gained.

Real Rush Repair. “Somewhere in France" there is a little river about the width of a canal and with the water confined between banks some feet higher than the surrounding country. The Hun naturally shelled these banks, with the intention of letting all the stream into the fields. Now and again he got home on his objective. But in a few minutes, with sheets of corrugated iron, posts, wire bindings, rolls of brushwood —in fact, anything that was at hand —the gap was filled in and the damage repaired. This was a real rush repair, and it went on at intervals, day and night, for a week or ten days. Then Tommy shoved the Hun back, and he had something else to occupy his attention. Getting up material for these repairs by means of /motor lorries is, too, not a task for children. When you walk across a field or through a wood there isn’t usually much danger in it. But the Huns know where the roads are, and he also knows there is transport coming up or down practically all the time. So, suddenly, he starts shelling, and then you have to get a real move oh. You are also, I may add, just as likely to run into anything as to run away from it. Once a lorry was going down to fetch some stuff from a dump about twelve miles back. Then the shells began to pop over. That meant putting on speedy and for five or six miles it was a race between the shells, the lorry and a motor car. The trio traveled “some,” but the car couldn’t gain a yard on the lorry, and eventually both ran out of range. When the lorry came back, loaded, a couple of hours later, it was found that four shell craters had been blpwn in the road, but that the engineers had already been on the spot and repaired all the damage done.