ANT-HILL FRANCE

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 121, 15 February 1919, Page 5

ANT-HILL FRANCE

A PATHETIC ALLEGORY,

(By Paul Bewsher, ill the "Daily Mail.")

I have often wondered what were tho feelings of the crowded population of ants in an anti-hill when a destructive human being had lifted it with a spado and turned it upside down. 1 know now. I have seen evacuated Fran'ce! I have seen the pitiful attempts of its disorganised and scattered inhabitants to return to' what were'once their homes. Slowly and painfully order is being created out of turmoil, and the dismembered families are collecting once, again. It is pitiful beyond words to see the groups of mud-spattered figures in black plodding along the miry roads' beneath the grey winter skies, struggling with their miserable,little packages.and bundles, their only possessions in ,the world. Fifteen and twenty miles. a day tliey tramp,, relying on Providence for food and a resting-place. The name of some village or town looms before their imagination -like the star in the East, and in their endeavour tj reach the well-beloved place they are oblivious of the difficulties and discomforts of their travel.

Inraddition to these'sad, solitary plodders are little hand-carts, piled perilously high with 6odden mattresses and chairs and beddinsf and nondescript bundles—pulled by old and young men in harness of string, and followed by bareheaded women whose hair is wet with the drizzling rain and whose skirts are streaked with mud. The ants are trying to rebuild their scattered world—slowly new galleries are made, new'entrances appear. / , . ' . . The greatest tragedy' of.' these weary r&fugees is that they do not' know whether they'will firid> their- house untouched and tenantablo or. whether they will find but a heap.of. bricks'and piled-up stone to wail • uselessly • over. It is sad to see a family'gathered in a' wretched house—their home—lighting a fire in the living. room, "under ithe open sky, *nd trying; to find - some sheltered ■ hole in which to sleep. • ' _ - ; In i the • square of Valenciennes the family groups sit round a pile, of mattresses'• and" clothes .wrapped 'in ' dirtstained "sheets.. Their faces hear-no ex-. ,pression ■ 6ave that of 1 apathy. ■ Lorry, after •„ lorry thunders. by; horse wagons 'driven by khaki-cla'd negroes shake and rattle across tho cobbles, a regiment of Scots soldiers tramps splendidly along led by pipers; and the women and children sit unmoved. They see nothing. They sit, sit, sit, waiting hour after hour, inert, lifeless, their only thought b get back—to get back! _ .... Northern France to-day is a setting lor a thousand dramas! How joyful is the reunion of the long-separated lovers and families; how glorious is the return home of the husband or son from whom no word has been heard for four weary years! How terrible tho agony of a man who finds his wife lias died through a chance shell in a village, and of the woman who finds the whole village in which she has passed the happy years of her life a low mass of rusty iron and powdered brick! The torn-up ant-hill of France represents in little the state of the world to-day as it tries pitifully to erect over its ruins a new order which will bo for a time but a sad ghost of its departed peace.