chance.




The Germans Concrete Trenches

By F.H. Gailor, American Rhodes Scholar of New College, Oxford

[From The London Daily Mail, March 24, 1915.]


At the kind invitation of General Longchamps, German Military Governor
of the Province of Namur, I spent two days with him going along the
country in and behind the firing line in Northern France from near
Rheims to the small village of Monthois, near Vouziers, on the Aisne.

About five miles out of Monthois we came to the artillery positions of
the Germans. We could see the flashes of the guns long before we reached
the hills where they were placed, but when we came up and dismounted the
position was most cleverly concealed by a higher hill in front and the
heavy woods which served as a screen for the artillery. I noticed many
holes where the French shells had burst, and the valley to the north
looked as if some one had been experimenting with a well digger. One
21-centimeter shell had cut a swath about 100 yards long out of the
woods on the hill where we dismounted. The trees were twisted from their
stumps as if a small cyclone had passed, and one could realize the
damage the shells could do merely by the displaced air.

We went on forward into the valley on foot and stopped about two hundred