AUSTRALIAN BATTLEFIELDS IN FRANCE

Hokitika Guardian, 12 August 1920, Page 1

AUSTRALIAN BATTLEFIELDS IN FRANCE

(From the Bulletin)

1 have just been visiting some of the Australian battlefields in that part of the long line which the Germans called the Blood Bath of the Somme. Wo motored for a hundred miles through country that had been blasted of every natural feature—past cemetery after cemetery #>f British, Australian, French and German dead; past villages which were only a name; through great towns which are heaps of rubbish ; along roads—the poplar-shaded roads of France—which are white tracks between rows of shattered trunks. It is only half the truth to say that highexplosives altered this countryside it destroyed it utterly and then remade it and gave it a horrible topography of its own. There are once lovely brooks which are stifled under heaps of dust. There are gracious willow-shaded canals which are now strings of bare billaboiigs. Enormous mine craters yawn on the site of peaceful fields which front skyline to skyline are churned into the semblance of a wild sea, on which, like niasts in a gale, half a dozen sticks mark where beautiful woods—Deville Wood, High Wood, Trent's Wood—once stood.

The British dead have been collected from these battlefields, but the French still lie buried where they fell. Clusters of tiny crosses amidst a wilderness of entanglements and mouldering- trench systems and all the filth and litter of war mark the fierce offensives of 191 b and 1916. Here a rifle surmounted by a. helmet has been stuck up over a grave, but the rains of two winters have washed tin- soil away ancl left the skeleton to bleach.

There is activity in the station yard of'Albert, but outside the gates the roofless houses stare with sightless eyes at one another across an empty road. The trains go to and fro carrying the passengers and goods of happier regions, and seem to shun the devastated areas aw if they had the plague. Ilapaiimc is still a heap of rubbish, among which we found an old man with spade and harrow digging for his cellar. In Pennine a little clearing has been done. Here and there in the iields the peasant and his wife were painfully iilliiig u]j the shell holes and preparing their shattered holding for the plough. Some of the inhabitants of the towns have returned and occupied the semicircular army huts that were left behind. There is a row of them at Peronne looking like the settlement of some Esquimaux tribe. They .have hung lace curtains at the windows, planted pitiful gardens, and put up their shop signs. New Bapaumo, a congeries of wretched hovels, lias been built out ol' the rubbish of the old town. In the shell of a church we saw a girl with a shattered right arm rooting among the ruins. When she looked round at us we saw slip had the face of an idiot.

Except for the army waggons collecting war material and the English and Australian graves detachments whose work is nearly finished, there were few signs of an organised effort to restore the devastated area which, like a vivid scar, stretches across the fa'eo of France from the Belgian border to Switzerland. To the tumult of war has succeeded the horror of deathly silence.

A ribald inscription in good Australian on a broken wall at Pont St Quentin ; a theatre such as 1 have seen in up-country villages in China, built by the Cliine.se Labor Corps; an English ollieer and an Indian private buried by the Germans in one grave —these are some of the incongruities of the war which levied its blood-tax on the world. There are 500,000 British graves in France and Flanders. They are gathered in great, bleak well-kept cemeteries amidst the desolation of the fields. There are 400 of these cemeteries. The little white wooden crosses—to be replaced later by tombstones of a uniform pattern—stand in long, straight military lines, and there are no individual monuments save those raised by Aus tralian, Canadian or other troops to a particular battalion. The British Government has just made known its decision not to allow individuals memorials to be erected, both because of the practical difficulties and because there should, it thinks, be no sense of differential treatment of the dead; officers and men who fought and fell with the same cause would have their names and their service perpetuated in the same memorial. It is a logical hut harsh doctrine, but there is something overwhelmingly impressive in those leagues of .standardised white crosses. In their awful arithmetical simplicity they are the best symbol of modern war, which dresses nations in universal khaki and crushes them .into one universal grave. Out of the Valley of Death, where the dugouts are like homes of a vanished race of cave dwellers, through fields full of French graves and British cemeteries, along perished avenues of trees ring barked by machine gun bullets, we passed through the remains of Villers-Brotonneux and that battered but still breathing wood where Australian bodies formed a barricade of living llesh against the last German advance towards Amiens. Coming out of that wood and the country behind it was like coming out of a cold and abandoned hell into the world of living men. Here at last were unscathed villages clustered around tiny white churches beside brooks which flowed. Here the road was a stately avenue of budding trees between smooth and cultivated fields. Over a distant rise, in the soft spring sky, the cathedral of Amiens floated like a vision. Every hill was capped with woods and every valley full o£. life and misty streams. Behind us, running up and down over the most distant hills and as clearly defined as the track of a forest fire, was the devastated area it had left behind.

We were the van guard of a million tourists who are coming this year, out of reverence, love, and curiosity, to visit the battlefields. Some will search loi graves and some for German helmets. There is a new army of 500,000 Americans already on the way. In Amiens 1 talked to a lonely Australian soldier of the graves’ detachment. He hoped that more would come. He wished that all the world could sec those scars before they healed. For time is drawing on a veil of indifference across the horror of men’s minds just as Nature is drawing a mantle of grass and wild flowers over the worst horrors of the battlefields.