A DENIAL OF JUSTICE

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 42, 12 November 1921, Page 7

A DENIAL OF JUSTICE

GERMANY AND FRANCE COMPARED

MR. KIPLING’S TWO PICTURES

In a letter to a French friend, an extract from which appears in the “Matin,” Mr. Rudyard Kipling describes the “long horror” of a. visit to the devastated regions of Northern France, which came just after a. visit to the Rhine, says the Paris correspondent of the London “Tinies.” On the Rhine Mr. Kipling had found a “countryside intact, full of women, children, and cattle, with fields cultivated right to the vdge of the road, smoking factory chimneys, and on all sides loaded goods “trains.” a, country untouched by the ravages of war. in fact. In France there was everywhere desolation, and everywhere there were Shellholes.

“When one thinks that there is not a single shell-hole on the land of the Huns (says Mr. Kipling) one feels that soon (if He has not already 'begun) the Almighty will concern Himself with a world which has refused justice to the world. Can one be astonished when such an iniquity has been accepted that all the forces of evil 'under the sun unite to say that there is no justice in Heaven to fear?/’

Mr. Kipling describes his first night at Verdun in an hotel in the course of reconstruction, with its atmosphere of fallen plaster and fresh paint. In the “terrible silence of a half-dead city” the noise of the wreckage of a. ruined house opposite swinging backwards and forwards, and then toppling and crumbling, could be heard, and “then a fine dust of earth and limestone filled our roomAnd somehow this dull, rumbling nois* (and this odour) made us realise more than the sights of the day had been able to do the horror of the years behind and to . come t

“Again, at Reims, in the middle of the night (Mr. Kijiling goes on) we heard that noiso (a crossbar cf broken iron in a wall twisted by fire), and ■again we smelt that odour. To think that a whole living country like this has gone for years already ’with this odour in its nostrils! A fine dust also filled our hair and mixed with what we ate —not fresh, clean dust, but that fine intimate dust that can only come from houses that have been long inhabited. In the open country, even at Vaux and the Mort Homme, Nature is at work trying to restore herself, and with time that will be accomplished. But in the towns, which are the work of man, man has to do his repairs alone,, and tho ruins of smitten houses fall and lie round him like a flock smitten with plague. "Shakespeare was right. To replace the dead who lie upon battlefields costs only the pain of birth (this is why the dead are so often forgotten and remain unavenged). But th* material works of man, the works of the long, hard labour by which, and in which, his soul lives] are not so easily rebuilt, and when they go, his heart goes with them. What will be the soul of a land which has to bring up its children with such souvenirs and in such scenes? IV* arc not yet. at the beginning of the evils which will issue from this denial of justice. And when the evils are there our wise philosophers will ask , What is ths cause?”

Mr., Kipling gives a vivid little sketch of an old countrywoman wandering about in the “immense devastation” and striking to right and left cf her with a rake, like a blind woman. He asked his guide, an Alsatian General, what she was doing, and the General replied, “I think she is looking for something that she buried before the war. I have often s*en that.” Although he had passed a whole day among the works of death, Mr. Kipling says: “This little silhouette, wandering across that broken, cliurnedup valley, turning her head from one side to the other like an ant, was more frightful than all I had semi during the day.” In conclusion. Mr. Kipling deciares that he finds it almost impossible to give a complete impression of the reality <o people to whom life, experience, and tradition have given no scale by which to measure it. They must, cross the *ca and seo with their own eyes, and 1 am glad io be able to soy that the people who go to see are mor* and more numerous. It is one thing to see the assassin before the tribunal, and if i» another io see the body of the If only we could make an alliance with Francc-and I am convinced that pt the. bottom of tneir hearts ’ s desire of -our people—we might still be satisfied.”