BATTLE-TORN VLLUAES

Hokitika Guardian, 30 October 1918, Page 3

BATTLE-TORN VLLUAES

SCENES ON THE SOMME

WAR’S WANTON DESTRUCTION

A vivid description of the havoc wrought by war in the Somme area is given by the special correspondent of

‘‘The Times.” who writes: “I have this morning been in C.'hipilly, and from the high ground east of it looked down oii Etinehem, which the Germans at the time were shelling with some industry using chiefly shrapnel. 1 approached the village by the south through Ccrisy and over the German built wooden bridge which spans the river here and passes over the lagons of the valley bottom. The former iron bridge lies with one end in midstream. Even to one who knew it before, the formidable character of the positions in the light of the last lew days’ fighting was particularly impressive as the tunnelled hanks and rugged hill faces lay naked and exposed to one approaching from the south. , Chipilly is but the ghost of a village now. The last time I visited it a brigade of gallant Canadian cavalry n’ere there. I looked for the building where I was present when officers assembled for a brigade conference. I found it would be a poor affair for any headquarters now, with walls pierced with ragged holes, and the road, though fairly intact, all tilted askew like a hat on a tipsy head. All the village is similarly ruined, and a pathetic sign is the old church, a mere husk, with the space inside the broken walls heaped with piles of splintered masonry. But amid all the ruin on cither side of the. shattered altar two large life-size statues of our Saviour and the Blessed Virgin still stand intact on pedestals against walls and gaze at each other across the wreckage. Even as I stood there the bullet of a rifle or machinecun from somewhere' eastward, or overhead whipped wickedly against tlie fragmentary walls, and splinters of stone were (lung inside the church. No house remains intact, and few are anything more than heaps of rubble and skeleton beams. The chief sign of liio in the village was the swallows, which have chosen this dreadful spot as a gathering-place for their journey south and streamed among the ruins. Clambering out of the village to the eastward, one could get a noble view of the Tovely windings of the river and of the village of Etinehem, over which shells burst constantly, while now and then great clouds of smoke went- up from the ruins as a heavy shell ploughed its way through. Turning north along the plateau we had spread before us, as Germans saw it, the ground over which our men had' to come to attack the woods—Malawi Wood and Celestins Wood on the left and Cressaire Wood on the right. They are not wrecked, as many woods are nowadays, but still are fairly leafy. The northern edge of the high ground is one wide clover field, which in the sunshine to-day was full of butterflies. But from it one looked across the deep hollow, which runs to the bare face of the opposing slope, down which our men had to advance, and at one’s feet amid the clover where the machine-gun posts from which ilie enemy commanded that open slope. T think it is necessary that otto should stand there with the wreckage of the recent battle round one to understand how great an achievement it was when first our troops pushed across that deadly glacis and by sheer indomitable courage cleared tlie dark mass to Cressaire Wood. ft Mats wonderful to-day to see bunches of our men with naked bodies gleaming white in sun bathing in peaceful readies of the Somme where doubtless the Germans bathed a few days ago. As one went by the shell-torn roads through the litter of the battlefield, everywhere wore signs of the rapidity of the German flight, and along the roadsides, ready to be moved, were poles or parks of all manner of booty, including sometimes batteries of guns, and in one place a whole family of trench-mortars, from great big “grandpapas,” throwing 2001 h shells over 1009 yards, to the latest little Sin. twin infn.nt.*4