FRANCE AFTER THE WAR

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2264, 16 April 1921, Page 4

FRANCE AFTER THE WAR

HIGH TAXES AND HARD WORK. “The French people have taxed themselves more heavily than the Germans,” said M. Paul Bibron, on his return to Melbourne, from a short visit to his native country. “There is a tax on the cigarette you smoke, a tax on your paper, a tax on your ink. Everyone is frying to help the nation to pay off its war debt. That is why the French are so sore over Germany's refusal to pay her indemnity. What is Paris like? Ah —a very different Paris from the old one I knew. Every cabaret in Montmarte —Lc Chat Noir, L’Enfer, even the Moulin Rouge itself—is shut. Before the war it was the tourists, the foreigners, who kept them going. Now the Government is afraid-that with the reaction afteivthe war years, the French themselves will spend all their money there.” M. Bibron paid a visit to the battlefields. “The towns are as the war left them," he says. “The French have not Troubled to commence rebuilding them yet —all their energies have gone to put the fields under cultivation. There is only one house rebuilt in Vi Hers Bretonnenux. The old hotel with the

arch ’at, Pcronno, which used to be the Australian' headquarters, still has a canvas roof. But out in the fields you see liTtle gangs of three and four men filling in the shellholes, which put the ground as if some terrible, gigantic hailstorm had swept across the country. Then the plough comes along. Alas! scores of men ifnd horses have been blown up through striking ‘dud’ shells.”