KIPLING SEES THINGS

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2612, 6 November 1915, Page 12

KIPLING SEES THINGS

f IMPRESSIONS AT THE FRONT. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has been to the front, and in the Daily Telegraph" describes in vivid glimpses what he has seen. He goes up a tree to a fire observation post in the trench line. "There was a' specimen tree—a tree worthy of such a park—the sort of tree visitors are always taken to admire. Wliat little wind there was swayed the tall top, and the ladder creaked like a ship's gangway. A telephone bell tinkled 50 feet overhead. Two invisible guns spoke fervently for half a minute, and broke off like terriers choked on a leash. We climbed till the topmost platform swayed sickily beneath us. Hero one found a rustic shelter, always of the tea garden pattern, a table, a map, and a little window wreathed with living branches that gave one the first view of the Devil and all his works. . .

"An. officer pointed to the largo deliberate smoke-heads renewing themselves along that yellowed beach. That is the frontier of civilisation; They have all civilisation against them— those brutes yonder. It'o not the local victories of the old wars that we're after. It's the barbarian—all the bargarian. Nowj you've setn tie whole thing in little Come and look at our children.'

"We left that tall tree whose fruits are death ripened and distributed at the tinkle of small bells. The observer returned to his maps and calculations; the telephone boy stiffened up beside his exohange as the amateurs went out of his life. . . .

"The women arid the children and the old men went on with their work with the cattle and the crops; and where a house had been broken by shells the rubbish was collected a neat pile, and where a room or two still remained usable, it was inhabited, and tlie tattered window curtains fluttered as proudly as any flag. And time was when I used to* denounce young France because it tried to kill itself beneath my car wheels; and the fat old women who crossed roads without warning ; and the specially doaf old men who slept in carts on the wrong side of the road! Now, 1 could tako off my hat to every single soul of them, but that- one cannot' traverse a whole land bareheaded."-