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Show ! counter-attacks against us Jn this dls-: dls-: trict. Several thousand prisoners must ', have been taken toddy in these opera- l tions and by drawing close to the forest of (formal we are drawing the loop i tighter around Valenciennes so that the enemy will have to withdraw quickly unless un-less he resists the danger of capture of its garrison. 1 am afraid there must be many poor peasants trapped alongrthis line of battle, wood cutters crouching In the underbrush through which the machine gun bullets, are slashing, ami wives of French charcoal char-coal burners hiding1 with babies In the cellars of little farmsteads. This has happened on the line of our advance beyond the bg towns and it is a tragedy which stirs the hearts of our men who go stepping day after day far from our lines of communications into this great unknown count ry which they call "The Blue." They give some of their bully beef to these women and children, though they arc ravenously hungry after cold nights and exhausting days, and they break off chunks of bread and thrust 1 them into the hands of the boys and girls whose pinched faces tell their tale, though they do not beg. Atrocities Repeated. Lamentable things are happening in some of these places, as at St. Amand. near Valenciennes, which was captured by our cavalry. Into this village the enemy collected nearly 1500 people who were suffering from what is called Spanish Span-ish influenza. He turned one building into a hospital for them and crowded it. Then when he ieft the village to escape i the cavalry which closed around it, he shelled it with mustard gas. Most of his , shells fell around the hospital, though his gunners ought to have known and should have had pity on these poor stricken souls, who went hiding in the cellars, so ill already that ..many could iot stand, and some dying, who are now dead, were aware of the poisonous vapors stealing Into their lungs and burning burn-ing them. That has just happened and our men are now getting these people away in ambulances as fast as they can be bremght up. This morning T saw many hospital nurses on the way to look after these gas patients, taking the same risk with brave hearts. The problem of civilian populations popula-tions liberated by our advancing armies is serious, and is adding to the burdens of our fighting again. One of our corps east of Douai has 42.000' people on its hands, all destitute, utterly without means of getting food, in grave peril of starvation unless we send supplies without delay. It Is not easy to send up supplies for people numbering many divisions of troops. Our transport difficulties over the old battlefields are already hard enough in supplying our own men, so that they may not go hungry in the front line. Thousands Starving. Add to that these thousands of starving starv-ing souls, and it may De imagined that our "Q" branch is in a desperate dilemma. But these are dilemmas that bring out the best in our race, and our administrative adminis-trative officers are giving themselves no rest in order to organize quick relief and thousands of rations are being brought up by men who drive all night without taking their share of sleep, by ambulance drivers who volunteer for overtime after long hours of labor at casualty clearing stations, so that these French women and children and those poor old helpless people peo-ple may not starve to death. There is heroic work to cure the tragedy of St. Amand. In Douai itself there Is tragedy, but of another kind. without human touch, for Douai is deadT In this home of old scholars and of many centuries cen-turies of splendid history and good craftsmanship crafts-manship there is no life except that of a stray cat or two, like one saw affrighted by my footsteps today in the lonely halls of the Hotel de Ville, where upstairs and downstairs there was utter loneliness and a great silence amidst the litter of its archives, flung about by German hands in search of loot. Where are the people of Douai? No single face looked put from the window? of its old houses today. Its cathedral was a house of silence, strewn with gold worked vestments and vessels and heaps of pipes torn from its great organ. I went into the gardens, neatly tended, with autumn flowers in bioom. and no gardener was there among the shrubs. I went into houses where there was food in the dishes, but no one to eat it. and in Us shops were cupboards opened and bare and all the furniture overturned, and crockery and glassware smashed by deliberate industry. It was a noble old city and Its gables and old carvings and sixteenth century frontages would tempt the artist's hand, and everywhere the man with a knowledge knowl-edge of history finds the spirit of old France calling to him with voices of its saints and scholars and princes and hurghers and fair women, famous in the pages of France. But It Is a city of ghosts and no human being is there, and I and two other men today were alone In it, and its solitude scared us so that we were glad to leave. VALENCIENNES IS NOW NEAR FILL British Reach Outlying City Streets and Have Set Up Outposts. Cover Affords Excellent Vantage for Enemy Machine Gunners. By PHILIP GIBBS. (New York Times-Chicago' Tribune Canle, Copyright.) WAR CORRESPONDENTS' HEADQUARTERS, HEAD-QUARTERS, Oct. 25. Our men are now Jn the outlying streets of Valenciennes, divided from the heart of the city by the Scheldt canal, which is the west boundary of the boulevards. They have outposts in the parish of SL Vaast and at La Sen-tinelle, Sen-tinelle, so they are able to look down the avenue of that old town where many thousands of people are waiting for deliverance, de-liverance, knowing the English are at their gates. There is not much fighting there, except ex-cept a big burst of machine gun fire, but south of Valenciennes to the villages and woods below Le Cateau, on a front of nearly twenty miles, there was a drive forward by our third and fourth armies toward the great forest of Mormal, covering cover-ing many hundreds of acres of dense woodland, and whose foliage is now turned to scarlet and gold like the leaves of all trees in this new battleground. JBeyond is a belt forty miles deep for hundreds of miles' where autumn makes no difference to the landscape., because all is dead. . Here, beyond our liberated towns of Cambrai, Douai and Lille, there are many woods and many streams and many small ridges and fields cut up by ditches and hedges so that it is not an easy country through which to fight. The enemy has plenty of cover for his men and guns. In the woods especially the German machine ma-chine gunners can lie in ambush and fire until our men are close to them, before stealing away down the glades and hiding hid-ing behind other trees. So our men have to go warily, and, rather than penetrate those dense woods, thick in undergrowth, they work around them, dodging machine gun fire and surrounding the German rear guards. Tanks Give Aid. On the fourth army front farther south, below Le Cateau, our troops had the help of a small number of tanks, which had a difficult country to cross owing to the number of small streams and tree trunk barricades, but they seem to have overcome over-come these obstacles and have been reported re-ported over the widest stream, making their way to the woods where the German Ger-man machine gunners lie in ambush. The morning started with a thick white fog, so wet and dense that when I went through Douai there was no visibility whatever, for our aeroplanes however low they 'flew, and they were flying just above the tree tops. It was, I think, in t favor of our troops, for it blinded the German machine gunners searching for any movement of men. Apart from the fog in the pitch darkness dark-ness when our men started their attack at-tack began at half-past two in some places and earlier in others it had been a bad night. The enemy, anticipating further action, fired large numbers of gas shells and tried to break up the assem-.4 assem-.4 bllng of our troops by a heavy barrage from field guns. Later in the morning the fog lifted and there was a golden day of autumn for this conflict in the woods of France. Some of our men worked around the Bishop's wood, and airmen report having seen them through the villages of Pommireull and on the east side of the wood which faces Land-reces, Land-reces, famous in the history of the British retreat down from Mons, because of fierce fighting in its streets. Fighting Fierce. One village, named Boussy, was. the scene of sharp fighting today and when our men closed around it numbers of Germans were seen running out of the other side towards deep shelters of the great forest of Mcrmal. At the same time fresh reinforcements of German troops debouched from the forest and met the runaways and there was wild confusion as some went one way and some another. an-other. It is probable that there will be strong |
