New Britain herald., 1916-06-24
YEGGMEN WOULD BE
 AHOWLING SUCCESS
Trench Fighting Fine Opportunity
 for Sandbagging, etc.


 modern machine warfare wherein every man was supposed to have be- come a pawn without initiative of his own has been developing perhaps the deadliest form of sport imagination can conceive-where every combata1t places his cunning, his strength and his skill in hand-to-hand fighting agaist 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. No subject is more tabooed in it's details by the censor. Com- manders do not want to let the enemy know why their raids succeed or fail or why the enemy's succeed or fail. Invention fights invention; secrecy fights secrecy.
 All the elements of boxing, wrestling fencing and mob tactics plus the stealth of the Indian who crept up on 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 a rifle. A club or a Sandbag or an Indian battle axe or spiked club is better. A good slugger without any weapon at all may take an adversary's loaded rifle away from him and knock him down and then kick him to death.
 The monotony of trench existence these days is broken by preparing for raids and against them. Battalion com- manders work out schemes of strategy which would have won them fame in smaller wars. Fifty men or thousand may be engaged in raid. It may be on a 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, the machine guns and rifles are prepared to sweep the zone of retirement.
 Snipers Keep Busy.
 An uncanny curiosity gives the sol diers incentive for the raids. Ordln- arily they never see their enemy hid den in his burrows across NO Man s Land" from their own burrows. Un- seen bullets from unseen snipers crack over head. Unseen guns sud- denly concentrate in a deluge of shells. For months this sort of thing goes on and the trenches of the adversa ries remain ssways in the same place; the grim monotony of casualties and watching continues. This arOuses the desire to ''get at'' the enemy which the trench raid satisfies. It means springing over the parapet and rush ing 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
 To go over the parapet ordinarily means death. Tn order to make any such rush there must be interference" as they say in football, and the barb wire 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 raiders with their prisoners.
 But the guns are not all: there is all kinds of organized trickery in order to enable a body of soldiers to get into the enemys trenches for @ few min- utes of activity when the occupants throw themselves on their invaders at such close quarters that it Is question if even a revolver is now a ora ctical weapon. It cannot be thrown over a traverse and a bomb can. Run ming into a German around the cor ner of a traverse a blow may be bet ter than a shot.
 Battlcrs Wear Corsets.
 There have been trench raids where every man who went out was respon- sible for a casualty or prisoner while the raiders own loss might not have been one in ten to then enemy's. There are also failures. Success requires 1 that every detail should work out right. The British inaugurated trench l raiding which the Germans promptly l adapted. Where it's development will | end no one dares venture to say. 1 One advantage of any raid is that | those who return are bound to bring l back some information of value to the l intelligence corps.
 | Officers in the trenches well ss officers in other military units usually wear steel corsets as a protection against spent bullets
 Score one for the breastplate,' said an officer who had been doubled over by shell fragment which hit him in ! the abdomen. Instead of a flow Of blood crimsoning his blouse all that was visible through the rent in the | cloth was an abrasion on a steel sur | face.
 But for your new corset you would have been dead by now" the surgeon | told him.
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