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Show BIG BOMBARDMENTS BK SQL01EBB M Terrific Artillery Fire From French Causes Germans to Kill Officers. MOST TERRIFIC HAVOC i Earth Disemboweled by Gigantic Shells, Not a . Yard Escaping Ruin. By International News Service Correspondent. Corre-spondent. Special Cable to The Tribune. PAKIS, s-0it. liil. 1 lu.vc just returned re-turned from the battletiold of the Sontine, impressed beyond words by tho indomitiiblc couture ;ind strength of tiie I'Vi'sch armies. Nowhere Itns French army orjiiuiizal ion readied sucli perfection perfec-tion as in fertile Pieardy. Nowhere have J seeu such scenes of absolute destruction. de-struction. These battle tie) ds present a spectacle of violence which can never be forgotten. The tenuau trenches, wonderful works of military engineering, reinforced rein-forced with steel and cement, with spacious spa-cious .bomb-proof shelters underneath, have been destroyed and blown into bits in a few hours, ait hough it took more than twenty months to make them. The white soil into which they were du has beeu pulverized to the fineness of table salt by Ihe merciless bombardment of the. wonderful French guns. Under an avalanche nf niHtal and high explosives explo-sives these trenches ceased to he works of del ease, and became prisons, to in lis from which no human beinjj emerged alive. Earth Disemboweled. And still, the ruined villages, where hardly one brick in left 011 top of another, an-other, and the tlat-tened trenches we 10 not the things that impressed me most on these battlefields. What struck me .most, and what even it t this mom en t seems absolutely incredible to me, is tiie frightful ordeal to which the entiro bombardment zone has been submit ted by the preach batteries, for there is not oue single square yard uf ground which has escaped the shel Is. Leaving the German tirst line, trenches behind us, we went on for three miles, through Do in pier re and Becqu in court. Everywhere we found shell holes, thousands thou-sands of them,-as Jar as your eye could see , and never mo re t h a 11 one or t w o yards apart. The surface of the ground looked as if it had been torn up by the claws of some gigantic monster. For t h ree in i les we w e 11 1 on , a n d in front of us the ground still present ed t he same appearance. One shuddered to think that this wide belt of destruction destruc-tion stretched north and south for many miles and that everywhere human beings by the thousand -lia-l been huddling together to-gether below the surface awaiting death or what was worse madness, for I am told that hundreds of poor tiennau wretches went mad under the bombardment, bombard-ment, and in many cases killed their officers. Organization Great. Surely there is no sight in tiie world to compare, to this. Jiut. these splendid results, which ha vc given K ranee certainty cer-tainty of victory, have not been accomplished accom-plished by a miracle. When you have visited, as I was permit ted to do, not only the actual battlefields, bul also tin; zones behind where you find the complicated com-plicated organ iza tiou whb-h a modern fighting army requires, then your astonishment aston-ishment ceases and gives way to admiration. admira-tion. Here, behind the li lies, 1 found tho roots of 1 he forces wh ich ha vo H isciu-bowel isciu-bowel ed the soil and disintegrated ihn villages of the. Soinme. It was here I found the key to the wonders 1 hail seen. The battlefield itself speaks to your senses, but tin organization in tho rear of it speaks to your mind. The organization nf the lines behind the fighters in the Homme is a masterpiece master-piece of intelligence, of logic, nf calculation, calcula-tion, foresight and co-nrdi nation, Tho Krench people may well be proud nf thn work of preparation and organ iznt ion which their military leaders have performed per-formed on the Sonime. Knnrinous quantities quan-tities of war matnri;il, whi-di had been I aecum ula ted before I he bat ties in tho I pieardy, still continue to flow into tho 'fighting zone as a gigantic torrent by irail, by motor car and old-fashioned I horse truck. ! Air Craft Superb. 1 Tim wniiderl'ul perfect ion of tho French flying coins, the daring of these, incomparable bird-men who fly wherever thev want to over the Herman lines, while not one enemy (Iyer dares cross the KreiM-h, who sow death and destruction, destruc-tion, who accompany the infantry when it attacks, and who act as the eyes of the thousands of French guns of every calibre from t he elegant " seventy-fives ' ' to the monster howitzers that require qier-ial railroads built for them, are superb. su-perb. The inipreion you get everywhere is one of order, of syslem, of calm ex-l.crtuitcv ex-l.crtuitcv and quiet c h e r ft 1 1 n (- Tim -oldiers' look hale and hearty, with their tanned t'm-rx and their hle:isant. smile. Thev work and fiht with equally good ! remember one battalion passing n. 'It was going back t Ihe trenches. The iiHMi steps were light and elastic, thev carried their bends high and thev were lau jhing and siin.'ing. One might .be-Peve .be-Peve thev were going on a holiday. J thooMl.t that men who, after fighting fnT more than two years, could go hack to the tren-'he.j in sn-'h a manner must have every chance of vic.t ory. |
