12 YEARS AFTER

Hokitika Guardian, 4 December 1928, Page 8

12 YEARS AFTER

THE GRIM THIKPVAL RiDGE SINISTER STILL TO-DAY. If you ask anyone “who knows,” lie "1,1 toll you cnipliatically that it is a waste of time going to France to see the battlefields,” .says “J.B.E.”’ writing in the Daily Express. “There's nothing to see—absolutely nothing.” lie will; tell you. “You wouldn’t know there had ever been a war.” Recently 0000 British Legion pilgrims jolted and rattled along the railway from Arras southward until they,came to the wayside station of Boa ucourt-sur-A ncre'. There they detrained— fathers, mothers, brothers, old and young—and in a few minutes we had wandered off in little groups. Many a pilgrim noticed, high up on a hill overlooking the valley of the A ncre. a tall granite tower with a l nion .Jack flapping idly atop, and doubtless wondered what memorial it was. Some of the women climbed the long slope, toiling bravely in the glazing sunshine, and ate their picnic lunches in the shadow of the tower. Very few knew what terrible ground they had passed, and fever still understood just where it was they were so contentedly rating ham sandwich and tomatoes. The hillside up which these mothers vallied was Thicpval Ridge, and they ale their lunches and took oil their h ots to ease, their aching feet on the site of the Schwa 1 on Redoubt, in the shadow of the memorial to the AGIh. (lister) Division. “VERY AIR SEE.US HEAVY.” Let no one sav; “There is nothing to see” in tin 1 battle area. I know dilferently. This grim, hare upland, frowning down on the old British line, i.s sinister still to-day, and so it will ever he; the very air seems heavy, and the light uncertain, on Thiopval Ridge 12 years after the flower of Kitchener’. Army perished on its slopes. No houses show their new retl roofs, no golden corn obscures the tortured earth, no gleaners bend to their peaceful work • m this dread ridge. A Yorkshire mother ami her husband sat down wearily on the yet substantial remains of a concrete machine gun emplacement. “Well, mother, it was a iiring walk for you.” “Aye, hut I’m here ail right, and ihe view i.s line.” ,“And what do you suppose this place was mother?” “Some poor tody’s house I doul.it. lucre’s not much left o’t now.” JJut this is the story. At 7.otJ in the morning on July 1 l(Jl(j, the Ulster Div.si.ni rose IVotn its trenches by the Ancre, and advanced up Thiopval Ridge towards “the Sell"alien.’ As they did so the German cuunterharrage fell on the bare lace of the hillside, and from the Seliwaben itself a most murderous machine-gun lire poured forth. AIAGNI.FICANT FEAT OF ARMS. Hundreds of those Irish hoys never got past their own wire. Thousands never reached the Schwa hen, hut were mown down in heaps all the way nji the slope. Many more lay wounded. The remainder, passed unharmed through he.l itself, reached the Schwa.en and captured it—a feat ol arms surely unsurpassed in all the annals of fighting men.

line, on either side. at Quillers on llio right and in front of Hamel on the left even the bravest of the hrave could not pierce a defence sa sltihhoin and so cruelly placed, and before the day was done the Selnvahen was in German hands again. A whistling hail of death poured out unceasingly to the left front of the Schwa lien. From a concrete machinegim nest the German gunners, feeding their cartgridge licit through the devouring breeches of their guns with cold deliberation watching, secure in their eyrie, the bill let sweep and lash the lines of khaki in front. Here the dead lay thickest: here the holocaust reached its awful climax. “BIT OF OLD ENGLAND.” We return to the pilgrims: “Time to he going down yon hill again mother.” “Aye. Hold me hag while I put mn shoes on, will yep There. I’m ready. We was lucky to find this old house a what-not to sit in.” They walked steadily down the Mill road, which had been No Alan’s Land, and in short while he took her hand to steady her descent. So, 12 years after, a little hit of Old England passed peacefully in the silence of the summer afternoon down that hillside which, wreathed in smoke, helching with flame, and covered with their head, was the last thing on earth that many a son of Old Engand ever saw.