FREED FRANCE.

Hokitika Guardian, 21 September 1917, Page 4

FREED FRANCE.

VILLAGES RISING PROA! DEFILEMENT.

(By Gerald Campbell.)

French Headquarters, July

A day or two ago I stood for half an hour outside the Gave du Nord watching men on leave being met by or saying good-bye to their own people.— There was one standing there, parting from his wife, neither of them saying a word. Only” they kissed each, other ; four t imes they kissed each other, and each kiss was like the parting of soul and body, and then, without a backward look, they went, she into the crowd, he to his train. And neither had shed a tear.

Sad? Yes, it was sad. lint it was something more than just a man and a woman saying perhaps a last farewell, it was Franco sending her sons out to keep her heritage of freedom for all their sons that will come after them.

Next day, as 1 stood on the fringe of a wo«d looking down on St Quentin, where the enemy watches toshoot at anything that moves out of cover or above ground, I thought of those two again and of what St Quentin and all the oilier ruined and tortured and enslaved towns and villages of their France mean to them. Meanwhile, as fast as they win the land back, the French armies aie removing. so far as ..the more serious side of war will let them, the defiling traces of war and the enemy, and' building up its life again. Yesterday I saw. ilie most wonderful example of their unquenchable energy and lightness of heart that I have yet-come across in this way. It was in a village—when I first visited it, the day after the enemy left it, there was nothing left of it hut piles of bricks—stretching up to and along the hanks of n, canal, still within reach of the Herman guns. To-day it is almost a village again, teeming with life, humming with industry, even ringino- with the hand music of two regiments.

Everywhere among the ruins little one-storeyed houses are springing up —■“ for the civilians when they come hack,” said the officer who, with justifiable pride, did me the honours of his restored kingdom. London Street and New York Street are now its main thoroughfares. Brooklyn Bridge and four other bridges, including the frail structure of planks by which the French crossed on the heels of the enemy, span the canal, on the hanks of which the Red Cross men have run up some neat little huts for wounded soldiers and sailors who have fever or want their teeth stopped.