ELEUTHERIOS K. VENIZELOS—The great Greek statesman who
recently resigned as Prime Minister.—(Photo from Medom Photo Service.)
LORD HARDINGE OF PENSHURST—Who, as Viceroy,
rules England's Indian Empire during the critical period of the war.
The villages are few and small, most of them are in ruins after the fighting in September; and the troops live almost entirely in colonies of little huts of wood or straw, about four feet high, dotted about in the woods, in the valleys, wherever a little water and shelter is obtainable. Lack of villages means lack of roads; this has been one of the great difficulties to be faced; but, at the same time, the movement of wagons across country is possible to a far greater extent than in Flanders, although it is often necessary to use eight or ten horses to get a gun or wagon to the point desired.
From the military point of view the country is eminently suitable for troops, with its possibilities of concealment, of producing sudden surprises with cavalry, and of manoeuvre generally. It is, in fact, the training ground of the great military centre of Châlons; and French troops have doubtless been exercised over this ground in every branch of military operation, except that in which they are engaged at the present moment.
What commander, training his men over this ground, could have imagined that the area from Perthes-lez-Hurlus to Beauséjour Farm would become two fortress lines, developed and improved for four months; or that he would have to carry out an attack modeled on the same system as that employed in the last great siege undertaken by French troops, that of Sebastopol in 1855? Yet this is what is being done. Every day an attack is made on a trench, on the edge of one of the little woods or to gain ground in one of them; every day the ground gained has to be transformed so as to give protection to its new occupants and means of access to their supports; every night, and on many days, the enemy's counter-attacks have to be repulsed.
Each attack has to be prepared by a violent and accurate artillery fire; it may be said that a trench has to be morally captured by gun fire before it can be actually seized by the infantry. Once in the new trench, the men have to work with their intrenching tools, without exposing themselves, and wait for a counter-attack, doing what damage they can to the enemy with hand grenades and machine guns. Thus the amount of rifle fire is very small; it is a war of explosives and bayonets.
Looking at the battle at a distance of about 2,000 yards from the enemy's line, the stillness of what one sees is in marked contrast to the turmoil of shells passing overhead. The only movement is the cloud of smoke and earth that marks the burst of a shell. Here and there long white lines are visible, when a trench has brought the chalky subsoil up to the top, but the number of trenches seen is very small compared to the number that exist, for one cannot see into the valleys, and the top of the ground is an unhealthy place to choose for seating a trench. The woods are pointed out, with the names given them by the soldiers, but it needs fieldglasses to see the few stumps that remain in those where the artillery has done its work. And then a telephone message arrives, saying that the enemy are threatening a counter-attack at a certain point, and three minutes later there is a redoubled whistling of shells. At first one cannot see the result of this fire—the guns are searching the low ground where the enemy's reserves are preparing for the movement, but a little later the ground in front of the threatened trench becomes alive with shell bursts, for the searching has given place to the building up of a wall of fire through which it is impossible for the foe to pass without enormous loss.
The attached map may enable us to look more closely at what has been achieved. The lowest dotted line, numbered 15, is the line of the French trenches on Feb. 15. They were then close up to the front of the German line with its network of barbed wire, its machine-gun emplacements, often of concrete, and its underground chambers for sheltering men from the shells. Each successive dotted line shows the line held by the French on the evening of the date written in the dotted line. Thus the total gain of ground, that between the most southerly and the most northerly dotted lines, varies between 200 yards, where the lines are close together northeast of Perthes, and 1,400 yards, half way between Le Mesnil and Beauséjour Farm. But the whole of this space has been a series of trenches and fortified woods, each of which has had to be attacked separately.
