DEVASTATED FRANCE.

Otaki Mail, 11 January 1922, Page 2

DEVASTATED FRANCE.

• ♦ AND CULTIVATED GERMANY. Wo have said that everybody admits what France has suffered by the war, and {be willingness to help to make good again her broken towns and arrested industries is general (writes a. London correspondent). Quite a number of French villages have been adopted by towns on this side of the Channel, and there is no niggardliness in the help they are getting. Even now, however, it is doubtful whether there is anything like an adequate realisation of the horrors wrought by- war. and of the great good fortune which Germany to-day enjoys because she succeeded in keeping the enemy off her own soiL Mr Kipling is at present touring Europe, and his graphic pen is bringing home to those who read his comments a sense of the real situation. The horrors he found on a journey from Straitburg to Verdun, via Nancy, are, ho says, worse than, those on the English front, to which are confined the investigations of most English tourists. Ho had crossed the Rhine, “to see the beast in his lair,” so that he is able to make a comparison with favoured Germany. He says: “I found a country intact, full of fat women, children, and cattle, fields cultivated up to ihd roadside, smoking factory chimney#, and on all sides trains laden with merchandise. . . . All this cultivated land bummed with rite contentment of peace and security. When one knew that there was not a single shell-hole in the land of the Huns one felt that soon (if he had not already begun) tho All-Powerful would occupy Himself with a world which had refused justice* to the world.’’ Perhaps. But it is still true, we think, that “the wicked flourish,” and the immediate thing is to remove, as quickly as possible, as fast indeed as human resources can do it, the horrors which affiict France. Thd best will in the world to do so exists nn this side, and if only her ewer-greedy politicians could be persuaded to hold their venomous tongues we should get on with the work very much better.