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Show GUH STUBBORN FIGHT British Penetrate Lines About Epehy Only by Hard Conflicts. New Divisions Arrive to Stiffen Enemy's Front in This Sector;: v. By PHILIP GIBBS. (New York Times-Chicago Tribune Cable. Copyright.) WAR CORRESPOND KNTS' HEADQUARTERS, HEAD-QUARTERS, Sept. 22. We have been having some wild weather here, with heavy rain, and our men in the fighting fields are wet and muddy. It is not pleasant in these fields, where, even behind be-hind the lines, twenty miles deep along all our front, there is little shelter for i troops except tents in swamps, a few ! groups of huts, slimy dugouts, and tarpaulin tar-paulin sheets stopping up monstrous shell holes and broken houses. Our armies are fighting', working and sleeping sleep-ing in wet clothes, because when it rains so heavily as during the last few days waterproof capes are of slight avail against the storm, and tents are leaky above and oozy mud and water squelch into the marching boots. There is something grimly picturesque about these rain pictures of war. Steel helmets of a battalion marching up to the line are washed by the downpour and gleam with blue light, their rifles tied about with rags to keep them dry. Rain pours down their shiny eapes and beats into their mud-splashed faces. Great guns go by on caterpillar wheels which grind up the soft tracks; field batteries move forward with gunners hunched forward for-ward on mules which are flaked with mud up to their ears, and the gun wheels splash through young ponds. Rains Everywhere. Long roads through the battlefields the Albert-Bapaume road. Arras road and Amlens-Peronne road those highways down which so much history of this war passed with fire and fury are golden tracks when the sun breaks through the clouds and shines on their puddles and on the rain-washed surface, where gangs 1 from labor battalions are at work filling 1 u p recent shell holes, smoothing out bumps and gullies made by the heavy traffic of moving armies. Storms break over the dead woods from either side of these highways, etched black against a gray sky or its white-clad mountain. And out of the wet earth, where countless count-less trenches and small craters are waterlogged, there rise the ruins of this world of ours. Dust, high-jagged walls of fallen houses, bits of churches, abbeys and monasteries with their stones washed white by the rain. Masses of broken brickwork from which the iror; girders stick out, twisted fantastically, where once there were villages of France, and here and there piles of rubbish which were a mill or a sugar factors' or wayside shrine. Desolation Emphasized. The wind howls through these ruins and the rain beats down upon them and men of ours wander through them with steel helmets lowered to he storm. Horses Efnd inulcs are stabled there in roofless rooms, gun limbers are stacked in gardens gar-dens where flowers still grow tn a wild chaos of sand bags and barbed wire, and, away over the desolate fields of this ties which cover some of the litter of infernal strife, there are long trains moving, and their smoke trails across the sky or rises like smoke of shell bursts. They arc mar-vclously mar-vclously near the fighting lines and within with-in a week of our capture of another line of advance they come up on new-laid rails, making a Clapham junction in the midst of battlefields, with branch lines and loop lines for transport of ammunition ammuni-tion and fof Red Cross train?. The light that pierces through back of the rain clouds reveals t liese slow-moving trains and Red Cross flags of field hospitals. 2nd long columns of lorries and transport wagons and gun limbers and mule teams, with little groups of men like ants on the distant sky line between the dead woods and the ruins. while all around, and for scores of miles, there are camps even" where. like a mushroom growth of bron tents and horse lines and gun parks. This is the background of our war since the recent advance, a nd the scene which our men hate, sometimes with a tiick hatred, and in which at other time.-, because n an is a ouecr, adaptable animal, they feel heim-eh or at home, with a'l Lhis as their normal way of life, holding all moani ng of ii fc until dea th corner. The fighting ycLrrd;iy was not ft 11 in our favor and we could no; hniri ail Ihr-d.iy'ti Ihr-d.iy'ti sains. This lo-al setback w.i, h- (Contiuued on Page Two.) (Continued from Page One.) loans capturing two heavy machine guns. At Haumont the Germans were captured in dugouts, where they had taken refuge from the stiff American barrage. The Germans answered with their artillery ar-tillery along the American line. The first American barragre began soon after midrrtght. The other started at 2 o'clock. Both continued for two hours. A unit of the American raiders entered Haumont. where the Germans had been using a church tower as an observation post. Sharp fighting took place in the village, the Americans getting the better of the Germans and obtaining the information infor-mation desired. Then they returned to their own )jne. A patrol found several dugouts east of Haumont and indications that the Germans were continuing to dig in. Another An-other patrol reported enemy trenches and numerous machine gun emplacements south of Dom martin. When the American barrages had started, the Germans apparently believed that another offensive had opened, and lilted the skv with rockets and signal shells. The heavy- shelling apparently caused confusion on the enemy front, because be-cause after the first barraee it was more than twenty minutes before the Germans replied. |
