A TOUR IN DEVASTATED FRANCE.

Hokitika Guardian, 24 March 1921, Page 3

A TOUR IN DEVASTATED FRANCE.

I.—THE FRENCH SPIRIT AT WORK t By Sir William Reach Thomas.) Tlie immensity of France’s task in restoring the devastated regions is described in a series of articles by Sir William Reach Thomas, who has revisited the scenes with which he was so familiar throughout the war. The journey, which extends from Railleul to Verdun—lately adopted by London—touches every side of the problem of reconstruction: the clearing of battlefields, the building and repairing of houses, mines, bridges, and railways; and the remaking of social life in tile thousands of hutment townships. THE ARGONNE. The devastation of Northern France, much of it emerging this month from I “the desert state”—a technical phrase in France —is still a complicated enormity beyond the reach of imagination. Even after traversing most of it, from Dunkirk to Verdun, and walking us battlefields, talking with the cave and shack dwellers and officials in huts, all that 1 realise is that 1 never realised it before. And yet I saw in 1914 the ruin of the first 500 shells in Arras, the cold-blooded mining of town and village in the German retreat of 1917, ami the sap bubbling out of the shorn orchards, the progressive annihilation of towns such as Lens and of a thousand villages. *****

? I l 'i mi res scarcely help—tliat 3,720 towns and villages and 3,460 miles of railroad were destroyed and 7,200,000 f acres rendered useless and 2,712,000 1 | people homeless. One can only per--1 Imps feel the meaning by aid of the ■ eyes and personal contact with the men, women, and children struggling to make - a home in such and such a scene; but ‘ first one may help the imagination by t putting it all in terms of England. Supposing South England had been the scene of the war, a traveller by the - 1 Chatham and Dover and the Brighton ' and South Coast and the South-Western ' Railways over their whole course, asj ' well as by a good portion of the Great ’ i Western, and bits of other railways, 1 j would not pass a single unshattered ‘ town, village, farm, factory, or wood. Every station would be new. Whole counties would be uneultivable, some ; difficult even to walk over and danger--1 ous to dig by reason of the thousands of the unexploded bombs and shells, though a thousand a day were still be- , ing “touched off.” ! Pretty well the whole ol the rural | i inhabitants south of a line from Bristol | : to London would be homeless. I ; s * * * * j Mow little have the French them- , ! selves said of the gigantic woik, to , j which, with their crippled man-power, , j they have set their hand! t j Impute what faults you please to the | I Frenchman but never say that he ( ' whines. The bitterest rebel I met, who | would willingly have strangled every contractor within reach, bore his own | losses without a murmur. He dug his j garden—as Voltaire advised his hero s Candida —decorated his shack, warmed s his hands with gusto before a stove j, heated with beams from his old home deliberately mined by retreating Get- j. mans in BBS. The stool lie sat on was a piece of the trunk of his favourite apple tree. \< The whole world has bewailed Lou- () vain. But Louvain, Termotide, and Liege together are in bulk of destine- j. lion, and its sequent confusion, no j, more than a phrase of a sentence of a j. chapter of a series of volumes compared t( with the ruin of Northern I'ranee. We lament the lack of decent houses - u for English heroes. About a million I 1 ’reiic.ii people are quite homeless, if a t | home means a Imilded house. K] You meet wherever you step incred- u ible scenes revealing all that is most Jpoignant in human life; and everywhere emerges in one shape or another that French quality of mental invincibility, not least palpable where misery is

“most pure”—to use a phrase used to me—and the work of reconstruction, one may say resurrection, least energetic. The grey-haired solitary poetess in her cellars oil the Arras road, the housepainter in his shrapnelled railway ttuck mi the Aisne, the mother anxiously ; weighing her bahy on the kitchen scales, , the farmer plodding with his spade from shell-hole to shell-hole on the Somme battlefield, the passionate guide to the ( Verdun forts, the shopkeeper building , his own house at Albert these and a thousand others express a sort of . spiritual vitality peculiarly and wonder- , fully French. ( < The people are lighting a second war j with the passion—and some of the, wretchedness—of the first. j Whatever mistakes the the generals of the new war—are mak-j ing,"whatever errors of intention may', lie"alleged against contractors or the ; morals of imported workmen, whatevei j bitterness is nursed against this Ally 01 j that, the French spirit is at work, and j the balked miracles performed. J Battlefields become farms and gar- j dens again. Towns arise from the j ashes and coal from the floods. V >1- 1 . luges recover social life. The Ancie that was a marsh flows clean to the sea I , and the trout swim up it. Seedling h trees thrust up through the crumbled I ] rocks and uprooted woods ol the Ravine j of Death itself. ' , 11 -LONDON’S (lODCHIIjD. ; VERDUN. ; It is an experience, like no other, to j come suddenly into busy Verdun from j the lonely, mysterious trenched and I caved woods of the Argonne. The sensation is of emerging from a railway tunnel into a sunny and spacious country. I felt like Childe Roland in Browning’s poem : it oainc* on me nil at once, This was the place! those two hills j on tin, right, | Crouched like two hulls, locked horn! in horn in light; j While to the left, a tall scalped j i mountain.” j “Verdun is a poem,” was the exact phrase used to me by the Mayor of Albert. j “Verdun is a symbol,” said mv companion in the train. “We are (piite as important as Verdun,” said an official at Arras; and all three expressed jealousy as well as pride in Verdun, the world’s favourite, whose claims came first in the eyes of all nations.

\ Special fast trains enable you to sei Verdun from Paris within tho day, am sightseeing is organised ns it is nowhert else in France. n Now Verdun has no close and parti cular connection with the British Army; but Surprisingly at any rate. 1 to my surprise— in Verdun, alone of all ‘ tho places 1 have visited, did I find any real interest in the new schemes of adoption. ’ r fhe whole population is excited about it. Two shopkeepers—one selling ex- ’ cellent hoots for a sovereign and the other sporting-guns for £B—met in th ( . ! street to discuss it. Cathedral worshippers whispered “London . . . Verdun” ’ before they pushed open the double doors of the repaired chapel. The. population as a whole (and it is as hi" as before the war) seems to regard the adoption by London as a final compliment—a final stanza to the “poem,” a last flourish, to the symbol—to the place where the French Will beat the German Will. This scheme of adoption is all very pretty and nice. It is everything that a compliment should be; but a godchild docs not as a rule estimate its godfather by the fact that he accepted the honour of the title-dole. The pleased excitement of the people of Verdun will turn to bitterness if London does not very soon do something worthy of her name, of the name of V erdun, and of the new mystical asociation. Let London read its Shakespeare: “The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.” Mark that word “adoption.” For the hoops of steel, ferro-coneroto or gold may be substituted, but in any event the grappling should he quick 1 and adequate. Much the best form ■ for the god-father’s gift would be some solid useful necessary building to be erected a once as both a permanent memorial and a present help. Opportunities for great friendships are rare and do not bide delay. What the French have, already done at Verdun adds to “the poem.” New j mtillions in the window spaces, new Gothic shafts worthy of the Middle Ages hold the roof of file cathedral. The taps and scrapings of masons’ tools toll of a busy competition between the private citizen and the State to be first in tli is. A large and stately barracks has enierged from the scaffolding, so perhaps the State has won, though there are scores of “good seconds.” An eager, active, populous town is in being, much needing that extra bridge bit in the centre by a German bomb, and the new lines and station at this season fully busy without aid or hindrance of foreign visitors to the shrine. From the hum and bustle that surprised you on quitting the liammeied woods of the Argonne you pass through to the supremest desolation in Europe, the deathplnce of nearly a million men. One of my few companions was a humble French woman, "hose brother fell at a certain farmhouse be and ski- had known. When we reached the spot we found a broad new road across it, and could trace no sign at all of | past habitation, beyond one upturned tree-root. Close by, half a hillside of men were digging in a cemetery. Just beyond was' the dreadfully preserved ‘‘Trench of Bayonets”. The nothingness was too much for her. She broke into tears, but bravely keepin" them under said to me with the last sob that escaped her: “They, ought to make a picture postcard of'it.!’ Deep grief is like that, Its refuge is in any word that comes. But at least let no outsider mistake the depth of her grief because it took nidi lamentable form, or ever anywhere judge the struggle of Northern France by the measure of the picture instca rd (To be con tinned).