The Cordova daily times., 1916-06-08
DEFY DEATH ON LINES IN
 FRANCE
BRITISH HEADQUARTERS

fhANNE r., May ". - ktOTTeSpODueHte of the Associated PressD - Between the British and German modern ma. chine warfare wherein every man was supposed to have become a pawn with out initiative of his own, has been developing perhaps the deadlest form of sport imagination can conceive where every combatant places his cunning, his strength and his skill in hand to hand fighting against those of his adversary.
 Hardly a day passes that there is not a trench raid" by one side or the other and sometimes several such sallies Commanders do not want to let the enemy know why their raids succeed or fail or why the enemy's succeed or fail Invention fights in yention. secrecy fights secrecy.
 All the elements of boxing, wrest- ling, fencing and mob tactics, plus the stealth of the Indian who crept up on a camp on the plains and the team work of a professional baseball nine are valuable to the player.
 The weapon that is least needed is rifle. A club or a sandbag or an Indian battle axe or spiked club is bet ter. A good slugger without any wea- pon at all may take an adversary loaded rifle away from him and knock him down and then kick him to death.
 Life Monotonous.
 The monotony of trench existence these days is broken by preparing for raids and against them. Battalion commanders work out schemes of strategy which would have won them fame in smaller wars Fifty or thousand may be engaged in raid. It may be on front of fifty yards or a thousand. It's object is to take as many prisoners and kill and wound as many of the enemy as possible in a few minutes: and then to get back to their own trench. The assaulters try to hold on to the piece of trench they have taken, the guns are turned on them, the bombers close up on either side, and machine guns and rifles are prepared to sweep the zone of retire ment.
 An uncanny curiosity gives the sol diers incentive for the raids. Ordi' narily they never see their enemy hid den in his burrows across No Mans Land" from their own burrows. Un- seen bullets from unseen snipers crack overhead. Unseen guns sud denly concentrate in deluge of shells. For months this sort of thing goes on and the trenches of the ad- versaries remain always in the same place; the grim monotony of casual ties and watching continues. This arouses the desire to "get at" the enemy, which the trench raid satis- fies It means springing over the parapet and rushing across No Mans Land" into the very houses of the enemy and man to man on his door step proving which is a better fighter.
 Guns Protect Raiders.
 To go over the parapet ordinarily means death. In order to make any such rush there must be "interfer- ence," as they say in football, and the barbwire in front of the enemy's trench must be cut. This is usually done by the guns, which become more and more deadly in their ability to turn accurate sprays of destruction on given points, They cover the rush and they cover the return of the raid CTS with their prisoners.
 But the guns are not all; there is all kinds of organized trickery in or der to enable a body of soldiers to get into the enemy's trenches for a few minutes of activity. when the oc- cupants throw themselves on their invaders at such close quarters that it is g question if even revolver isI now a practical weapon. It cannot be thrown over a traverse and bomb can. Running into German around the corner of a traverses blow may be better than shot.
 There have been trench raids where every man who went out was respon- sible for casualty or prisoner, while