The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-07-21
always does when puzzled by night

| always does when puzzled by night mysteries.
 He painted the dim moonlight green and red and a dirty yellow with his rockets of inquiry, and the Very lights | made No Mans Land as dazzling as Picadilly on peace night.
 His vague fears were realized to the full at ten minutes past three. The ground reopened below the brim of Wytschaete as though the furnace doors of Hades itself had been thrown back, and an enormous fountain of fire spurted into the sky.
 It was infinitely terrifying. An other fountain gushed on the right, still another on the left. The black shadows of the slope turned to flame as the mines went up and with them the stout trenches-the scared face of Hill 60, a score of redoubts, and long banks of wire vanished in the night, and when dawn came there re- mained only dreadful gaps. Assures in the naked earth where our men found imbedded the remains of many of their enemies.
 f The earth rocked as though a giant hand had roughly shaken it. Then the guns began anew. It was a won derfully scientific barrage that drop ped in front of the advancing Eng fish battalions, the Irishmen, who had sunk their difference to meet the com mon foe. and the New Zealanders and Australians, who kept their end of the advancing line. It curtained the ground we were sweeping over and it countered the waiting German batter ies beyond the ridge.
 Machine Gunners
 Machine gunners sought to delay our men as much as possible. We had particnlarly hard fighting in the ruins known as the White Chateau and in Battle Wood-many of the names are of British designation-where the Huns still have a lodgment, but with out hope of making it a profitable souvenir from the wreckage. of the ridge.
 Our men got into the trench known as the Damstrasse and speedily clear ed 1t. They pushed through Ravine Wood. and found it simply choked with concrete dug-outs, or rather their OO> mans. They overran such indistin- guishable patches of cratered earth as Bethlehem Farm, south of Messines- two guns were. found here-and Lumbs Farm, and Vermanmolen and Au Bon Fermier Cabaret
 In many places prisoners began to come out of the ground. Some of them tried to. surrender to tanksA-I have no details of the performances of the tanks, but I hear that they have done well, and two of them particu- larly so-and, little parties started running towards our men with hands up. A few of them were wounded, others deaf, stunned by mine explo- sions, and all extremely docile and glad to be shepherded back to the col lecting cage and safety.
 Within an hour the first groups of dazed prisoners were trickling back along the roads, some of them still so bewildered by the terrific shock of the, mine explosions thta they could scarcely think or talk coherentIy.
 Mixed Packet
 They were curiously mixed assem- blaze in the collecting cage. Youthful Prussian grenadiers lay on the grass in one corner. nerve-shaken and ap- prehensive. one slight boy of the 1918 class on the verge of tears, while in another part of the enclosure twenty or thirty Bavarians of fine physique cooly watched. the aa~oDis ,e in the light or the rising sun and the ceaseless stream of traffic flowing past their barricade towards the battle front, quite unshaken by the ordeal which had broken the spirit of their comrades. 3sl
 The Bavarians were less than six hours in the line before they were captured, and that fact undoubtedly explains their higher morale. The 3rd Division. of Whcfh their 2srd Regiment was part, had rested and ref1tted for month after being badly punished in the battle of Arras a
 The men had light duties and plenty of recreation in the Belgian villages. and they came up yesterday to the Wytscha aete-M Messines sector newly uniformed and fattened for the Bri- tish attack which was expected in the near future-
 Killed Before Fighting
 They had suffered from our block ading barrage on the Journey Some of the companies had casualties be- fore they reached the trenches, al-s though they were not SO heavy as those of the Prussians adjoining. They took over" during what they regarded as an intense bombardment although the tired men they relieved told them it was not equal to average daily she'll ing of the past week.
 Hardly had they settled into the un-s familiar defenses when the mines went up, and the first group of British in- fantry found them helpless in the front line a few minutes later The Bavarians said that when they were captured and sent back our men were going ahead well, and they did not appear to have had any casualties
 Even more emphatic on this point were the two North German grena- diers of the 1918 class-almost pa tehtically boyish recruits, who looked as though they ought to have been at home with their mothers.
 They had been in the line for some days with the 4th Grenadier Reei- ment, which Is part of the Second Prussian Division, and had suffered exceedingly from our artillery. Food could not be brought up. sleep was impossible, and in the support line, 200 yards behind the front trenches.