FRANCE TO-DAY

Hokitika Guardian, 22 May 1920, Page 4

FRANCE TO-DAY

TAFTS HERSELF FROM RUINS STRICKEN CITIES.

I wish everyone could see Northern France, particularly the Ghateau-Thiey-ry-fJoissonsßheims -area (writes Eliot Wadsworth, special correspondent of the “New York Post”).

The change from conditions of the past two years is almost unbelievable. In 1018, just before the great battle of Picardy, this country was filled with French troops, butteries and transport awaiting the expected spring drive of the Huns. In 1919 you could not move half a mile without finding Americans in ones, Twos, or hundreds. To-day you can drive miles without seeing a uniform; the only evidence of an army is in tho great piles of shells, barbed wire, and debris along the roads, where they are being gathered up by squads of Indo-Chinese workers.

Instead of a constant flow of motor transport ,open cars, staff limousines, motor-cycle side cars, there is now only an occasional peasant cart, with its big wheels and string of horses, lumbering along the roads. The cracking whip of the driver Is the only noise which disturbs the peace of tho countryside. You may motor for an hour along the perfect roads without meeting a car. Shortage of gasoline and difficulties of railroad transportation, which interferes with proper distribution, make motoring in France to-day no simple pastime. In all this territory of the ChatoauThierry salient there is hardly a house untouheed by shell fire and there is hardly a field untouched by the plough. The people have come back. They ar e living in cellairs or small wooden barracks—the most temporary or emergency quarters answer the purpose—and every hour is given to the land. Houses and barns will c ome in future years. They must wait until the land lias done its best.

Shell holes and trenches are filled; barbed wire by the ton is rolled up. Across the fields, as far as the eye can reach ,may bo seen the lines of big French horses or yokes of four or six oxen steadily plodding along. Every member of the family is able to help. Guiding the team, the plough, or the harrow is within the capacity of old and young alike. These people are pioneers once more, but in quite a different way from the American pioneers. They come back to a country with perfect roads, wellestablished boundaries, the railroad telegraph telephone, motor truck and many other facilities. Their lot is not that of the American pioneer. It is the comparison with what they have lost that hurts. Houses, capital, much of their live stock have gone. AH the heirlooms handed down from oast generations have been destroyed. The present generation starts again to build for the'future. These people are infinitely better offi than the peasants on this land of one hundred or even fifty yea l -; ago. It will not take long to build up from the soil a civilisation equal to or better than that which has been-wreck-ed by the German invasion. That they are going to do it, .there can he no, doubt.

In the cities the problem is quite different. Reims had a population of 120,000 before the war. Now it is estimated that 60,000 people find lodging and a living in the ruins. Practically not a house or building ‘is untouched by shell fire. A very large number are destroyed. 'Exposure to the weather for throe or four years has added to the damage. Temporary boarding lias made some houses and hotels habitable. Around the station are. many wooden barracks. Electric lights are (gain intermittently available. Gangs of men are stringing wire for the dilapidated street railway not yet in operation. Sightseers are everywhere, and the souvenir vendors are doing a thriving trade. The cathedral in its majestic ruin-da photographed hundreds of tines a day. But there is not a true beginning for the rehabilitation of a splendid, prosperous city, and the future is not as clear as is that of the farmer on Ids own land. AH the qomplicated details of industry must be built, up. Labour, capital, machinery, markets for product, housing must slowly fit together to make a city over again. Patching and a tourist trade are not enough. Soissons is more wrecked than Reims. Fismes, still worse, is a souvenir . of good American artillery practice, as a French officer expressed it. These cities and many others in the war area all the way to the Channel make the complete revival of F r * ice a work of many years and much saving and hard work.

This is the cold gray dawn of-!he morning after. The excitement is over; the music of war has died away. There must he many a headache, as ell as heartache, among these plodding struggling men and women, who labour from dawn to dark. There is little of joy in the present and yet they are steadily at work among the e roses on which hung the blue helmets in honourable memory' of men who saved this land for those who have come hack to build again.