WESTERN RAIDS.

COURAGE AND CUNNING

FEATS OF OUR AIRMEN.

From PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS (France), Thursday.

The enemy has not taken advantage of the wonderfully fine weather of recent days for anything more than raiding operations, and now there are squalls blowing and visibility is obscured by wet mists. The recent procedure of the enemy has been to make a series of artillery demonstrations and raids up and down the front. For the purpose of keeping up a nervous tension and also with the minor object of killing men and concentrating on destructive work in certain areas, the German guns have been bombarding heavily in many directions, and active with harassing fire at long range. Yesterday and the day before their batteries and trench mortars were at work against the Bellevue spur and Shrewsbury Forest up in Flanders, and north and south of La Bassée Canal, round about the old hunting grounds of death at Vermelles, Philosophe, and the Llarch Plain in the centre of black slagheaps and broken pitheads, which I described a week or so ago when I went out that way. Their high-velocity long-range guns have been trying to find a target as far behind our lines as the neighbourhood of the good old town of Banleul, away back behind the Ypres salient, Laventie, behind the Neuve Chapelle area, and Vlamentinghe, where the ruins have been haunted three years or more with the spell of evil memories. There has also been a lot of gas shelling round Fauquissart and southwards in the area of the Cambrai fighting. All that belongs to the mechanics of stationary warfare, and is as inhuman in its interest as a typhoon or a sky full of thunderbolts from which men dodge. The raids that go on every night from our side and the enemy’s have at least the human drama of fighting between men and men, and are less soulless and cold than the pumping of high explosives anything from two to fifteen miles over an unseen enemy. The raiders are hunters of men, and they have the fierce excitement of the hunt and its human terrors when their prey turns at bay and its uncertainty and adventure. The success of the raid depends on leadership first and then on luck, and after those two elements – some people would say before them – upon the expert training, the courage, and the cunning of each individual in the party. It must have been good leadership and great cunning and courage and the essential gift of luck which enabled some two score of our men to go out yesterday morning by the Reutelbeek in Flanders and capture a German pillbox, and bring back thirty-seven prisoners and three machine-guns, with very few casualties of their own. This morning the Australians, those raiding experts whom I described a few days ago, went over into the German trenches again with successful results, and there was another raid near Ronssoy, above St. Quentin. Luck is not always with our men – that would be a miracle. The other morning some Highlanders found the enemy ready for them, and failed to get through their wire under a blast of machinegun fire. The Germans have been successful in capturing some of our outposts, but far more often than our men have failed in their purpose, and have lost heavily and come under our fire without getting a prisoner.

‘DISGUSTED’ GERMANS.

This morning before dawn they failed near the Ypres-staden railway, and during the last few weeks have been repulsed in many places. Some of their troops at least do not seem to have the individual courage and nerve power necessary for these frightful little dramas in the dark, and, indeed, it seems certain that some German battalions now in the line hang back from any kind of attack, and are low spirited men, whose fighting qualities are sapped. Some of the prisoners taken in the assault which was made by the enemy up by Passchendaele on March 11 are frank in saying that many of their comrades would not leave the trenches, being underfed and, to use their own words “thoroughly disgusted.” They complain about their artillery preparation, and say that their trench mortars fired wildly. They are wondering what their divisional general thinks of the utter failure of the attack. I have believed for some time, and I am still of that conviction, that it would be difficult for the German High Command to carry on an offensive of anything like the Verdun kind through four or five months of enormous sacrifice in life and blood without risking a revolt among their troops. Meanwhile, during the inactivity of the infantry, apart from raids, there is constant fighting in the air, both by day and night, Our aviators have been extraordinarily active during the past few weeks, and the enemy has lost many of his pilots and machines.