WHAT INVASION MEANS TO FRANCE

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2340, 23 December 1914, Page 6

WHAT INVASION MEANS TO FRANCE

: ♦ COUNTRYSIDE IN RUINS PITIFUL SCENES Mr. Philip Gibbs, who has sent some of the best dispatches from the war, gives this vivid picture iu the "Daily Chronicle": of what the ; invasion of their country is meaning to the French people.

."England is sending the best of her sons to fight for honour's sake and civilisation, and the imagination of our people is beginning to realise, though -still slowly, I tliink,. the tragic, significance of this worst of wars," he i writes. "But it is impossible, I am '■sure, for people safe at home in England, in the peace of old coun/try towns ..'and the quietude of English villages, ', to understand, evenly dimly, the meaning of invasion by hostile armies. "They understand it here in northern France. They know the misery and the horror of it. It is a great fear which, spreads like a plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy's troops. It makes the .'bravest men sick with cowardice when they think of the women and children. . 'It makes the most callous man pitiful .when he sees those women with their little ones and old people, whose place ,is by _ the liearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint with hunger and . weariness or pleading for places in cat- • tie . trucks already overpacked with fugitives, or wandering about unlightiid. towns at night for any kind of lodging, - and - then, finding . none, sleeping on the' doorsteps of shuttered houses and under the poor shelter of overhanging gables. '•'At the present time in this part of France there are thousands of husbands who, have lost their wives and children, thousands of families who have been divided hopelessly in tho wild confusion of these retreats from a brutal soldiery.. They lava disappeared into the maelstrom of fugitives—wives, daughters, sisters, mothers and old grandfathers and grandmothers, most of them without money and all of them dependent lor their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the French newspapers there are long lists of inquiries. : "'M- Henri . Planchet would lie ueeply grateful to anyone who can inform him -ofvthe whereabouts of his ■wife Suzanne, and of his two little ! girls, Betrth©. arid Marthe, , refugees from Aire-sur-Lys.' ' : " 'Madame. Tardieu would; be profoundly grateful for information about her daughter, Madame des Rochers, -who . fled from the destroyed town of Albert • oa, October 10 -svitb her four children.' . day I read some of these lists ■ with a, pain in ; the-heart, - finding a tragedy in every line,. and . wondering whether any of .these missing people are among .those, whom I- have met in the , -guards', vans of troop trains; huddled 1 el ' l ' bundles, or on wayside platforms, patient in their misery, or in the long columns of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a -wooded valley • below the hills -where trermaii guns are vomiting their shrieking shrapnel. ... "Imagine, such a case in England. A man/leaves his office in. London and. 1 takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and..children are waiting supper for nim. .At "SVeybridge- tho train comes to-a dead halt. -llg guard runs up to -the engine-driver j and conies back to BJiy tnat the tunnel; has:be©n blown up Jy .tho enemy. It is reported that Guild- , a . a 'l the villages around havo •been invaded. Families . flying from Guildford describe the' bombardment of the town. A part of it is in flames.. The Guildhall is destroyed. Many inhabitants have been, killed'. Most of the others have fled.

The man -who was going home to supper -wants to set out to find his wife and children. His friends hold him back m spite of his struggles. 'You are mad!' they shout. 'Mad!" He has ao supper at home that' night. His supper and his home have been burnt * For "weeks he advertises in the-papers for the whereabouts of ■his wife and babes. ' Nobody can tell . does not know whether they are, dead or alive.

; There are thousands of such cases m- France. I have seen this very tragedy only _ yesterday—a man weeping, for his wife and children swallowed nj> .into the unknown, after,the destruction of Fives, near Lille. A new-born fcabe was expected. On the first day of lite it -would receive a baptism of "fire. AY no can tell this distracted man ,?m, r the motllor or child lives? . There are many villages in France to-day around. Lille and Araentieres, St. Umer .and Aire, Amiens and Arras, and over a wide stretch of country in Artois and Picardy, where in spite of all -weariness women who, lie down beside their sleeping babes can find no sleep for • themselves. For who can say w'hat the aught wdl bring forth? . 'Perhaps a patrol of Uhlans, who shoot peasants like rabbits as they run across the fields, and who demand wine and more wme, until in the madness of drink they begin to burn and destroy for mere lust of ruin. So it was at Senlis, at Crepy-en-Valois, and last week in many little villages in the region through which I have lately passed •■■.it is- never possible to tell tho enemy s next move. His cavalry comes riding swiftly far from the main lines or tJie hostile troops, and, owing to the reticence of official news, the inhabitants of a town or village -find themselves engulfed in the tide of battle before they guess their danger. Iney are trapped by the sudden tearing upi or .railway lines and blowing up of bridges, as I was nearly trapped the other day when the Germans cut a line a ;.few hundred yards away from my tram. If I had passed that few hundred yards ten minutes earlier I should have been caught in the trap, like scores or .poor people who'are now without any Wiy or escape. . "Yet tho terror is as great when no Germans are seen, and no shells heard. 'It is enough they are coming. They Shave been reported—often falsely— across distant hills. So the exodus begins, and, with perambulators laden with bread and apples, in any kind cf (vehicle-oven in a iiearse—drawn by poor 'beasts too bad for army requisitions, •ladies of quality leave their chateaux, ,nnd drive in the throng with peasant women from white-washed cottages. 'Perhaps in a little while) both the chateau and the cottage will be buried in the same heap of ruins. , "In a week or two perhaps the enemy is beaten back, and then the most hardy of the townsfolk return '"home.",. I have, seen 6ome of them going home—at Senlis, at Crepy, and other places. They come back doubtful of what they will find, but soon the.v stand stupefied in front of some charred timbers which were once their house. ■They do not .weep, but just stare In a dazed way. They pick over the ashes end find burnt bits of former treasures '—the baby's oot, the old grandfather's cbair, the parlour clock, Or they go iiito. houses etill standing neat and perfect, and find that some insanity of rage has smashed up all their household, as though baboons had been at play or fighting through the rooms. Tho chest of drawers has been looted or its contents tumbled out upon tho Boor. Broken glasses, bottles, jugs, are mixed \ip with ft shattered violin, the medals of. a grandfather who fought in '70, tho children's broken toys, clothes, foodstuff, and picture frames. I have seen such houses after the arriving and going of tho German soldiers. "Ruin and death come with this invasion. In the war zone there is no safety.