WAR GRAVES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 216, 12 August 1937, Page 8

WAR GRAVES.

Trips to - the battlefields in France and elsewhere still retain their popularity, as was evidenced by the large pilgrimage made to Arras recently by several thousand British relatives of the fallen, and other interested tourists. That this is so, nearly twenty years after the cessation of hostilities, indicates that the methods adopted by the War Graves Commission and other societies for the perpetuation of the memory, of the dead have been carried out on the right lines. It is surprising, too, states a French newspaper, that there remains so much to be seen on the former battlefields, apart from the graves. Barbed wire and corrugated iron take long to die, and over many a cottage door in Flanders and elsewhere is nailed an iron helmet. Often these trophies of war perform useful functions of peace, and often in an upturned helmet stuck on top of a post chirping fledglings wait for the welcome worm. Here Nature goes serenely on with its softening influence beside the grim reminders of that awful conflict. Gigantic memorials dot the landscape. Close by the visitor may leave the sunlit road to begin a climb down a stairway going deep underground to the “Labyrinth,” a subterranean clearing station. Here are to be seen vague remains of cave quarters, with kitchen, chapel, hospital, and an operating room; in the walls are occasional openings where passages lead to the trenches. What memories! The heart warms in the old soldier as be reads in faded paint on doorways the initials and numbers of "units of the British Army —billeting indications of the. war days. While most of the sightseers make their way by train or coach to the different points of the old Front, one yet finds quite a number of British ex-sol-diers tramping along the roads. They have come to revisit the old familiar spots in the old familiar way—and although they cannot always find the exact spot where they over the top they,can direct others often better than the inhabitants!