IN FRANCE.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 191, 14 July 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

IN FRANCE.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE FRONT. THE UNCEASING WATCH. (By Captain Bean, Australian Press Representative.) British Headquarter-, France. April 20. Rich green meadows. Rows of tall .-lender elm trees along the hedges. Low stunted and po'larded willows lining some distant ditch with their thick trunks, showing notched against a distant blue hillside, like a row of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under the tall trees, just bursting into green. Violets—great bunches of them—in the patches of scrub between the tail trunks, and yellow cowslip.*, and white and pink anemones and primroses. You see the flaxen-haired children out in the woods and along the roadside gathering them. A rosy-cheeked woman stands in the doorway of a farm at the cross-roads, and a golden-haired youngster scarce able to run at yet. totters across the road to her. laughing. Only tin's morning as we passed that same house there was the low whine of a shell and a metallic bang like the sound of a dented kerosene tin when you try to straighten the bend in it. Then another. We could see the white smoke of the shells floating past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few fields away. Drifted slowly through the trees, and then came another salvo. There were some red roofs iiAir —those of a neighbour-

ing farm;—but we could not see whether they were firing at them, or at some sign of moving troops, or some working party, if there were any; and Ido not know now. As we came back that way in the afternoon there was more shelling further away. The woman in the doorway simply turned her head in that direction for a moment, and so did a younger woman who came to the doorway behind her, then they turned to the baby again.

THROUGH THE TREES-A NIGHTMARE DESOLATION.

Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages further on had mostly been battered and broken. There was a road running at a little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been shattered. There was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups of buildings there, all shattered, burnt, and gaping, like the tangled nightmare of desolation on the morning after a great city fire. Further on was open country, again where the long communication trenches began to run through the fields, but you could see none of this from where we stood. Only in the distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have noticed, if we had looked for it, an occasional broken tree trunk—snapped off short or broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire. Those distant trees would be growing over our firing lino or the German. Jt is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Ga'lipoli, in spite of its water-logged ditches and the rain which lias fallen miserably almost every day since we arrived. There is green grass up to within a few yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches, and not a hinterland of powdered white earth, which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles. Here you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which, on a fine clay, fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away from the lines. The country is flat, and you see no sign of the enemy's trenches, or your own —the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as completely as if they did not exist. WATCHED. But you realise when you have been in that country for a litt'e while that you have eyes upon you all the time — you are being watched as you have never been watched in your life before. You walk along that country road as you would walk along the roads about your own home, until sooner or later things happen which make you think suddenly, and think hard. You are passing, a dozen of you together instead of the usual two or three, through those green fields by those gicn hedgerows, when there is a sharp whizz and a clee and a crash and a shrapnel shell from a German seventyseven bursts ten yards behind you. You are standing at a corner studying a map. and you notice that some working partv is passing that corner frequently on some duty or another. You barely noticed that there was a house near you. Twenty-four hours later you hear that that house was levelled to the ground next morning—shrapnel shell on each side of it to get the range —a high explosive into it burst ii up and an incendiary t-hei! to burn tiie rubbish : and one more French family is honie'c.-s.

It takes ymi some time to realise that it Wits von who burnt ch;it house—you and that working party which moved past the cro-s roads so nft.-n. Somebody must have seen you when the shell burnt alongside that hedgerow. Somehody must liavc lteen watching you all the time when you were loitering with your map at that corner. Someliody," at anyrate. must have been marking down from the distance the party moving round those cross roads. Somebody in the landscape is clearly watching you all the time. And then for the first time you recall that those grey trees in the distance must be behind the German lines; that that distant roof and chimney notched against a background of scrub is in German ground; that the pretty blue hill against which the willows in the plain show out like a row of railway sleepers is a barrier to the German trenches; and that from all yonder landscape, which moves behind the screen of nearer trees as you walk eyes arc watehing for you all day long; telescopes are glaring at you; brains behind the telescopes are patiently re constructing, from every movement in our routes, on our fields, the method of our life, studying us as a naturalist watches his ants under r. -!iss case.

Long before you get near the line, away over the horizon before you there I is floating what looks like a fat white green grub—small because of its distance. Look to the south and north and you will tee at wide intervals others one after the other, until tney fade into the distance. Every day brings them out as regularly as the worms rise after rain, hey bit there all day long in the 6ky, each one apparently drowsing over hie own stretch of country. But they are anything but drowsy—eacn one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain, his telescope, and heaven knows what instruments, and out on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of modern warfare —two or three of our own planes low down, and then a white insect very, very high—now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all, like a play. The bombs, if they drop them, arc worth risking any day. THE REASON FOR CAUTION. Hut it isn't the bombs that matter, and it isn't you who run the risk; the observer is not there to drop bombs in most cases, but to watch, watch, watch, watch r. motor standing by tne roadside, a body of men about some work, extra traffic along a road —and a red tick goes down a map, that is all. You go away, but next day or sometimes sooner that red tiek comes up for shelling as part of the normal day's routine of some German batterv.

So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war correspondent docs not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he would gladly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field pock-marked by a hundred ancient snell holes around a few deserted earthworths. Somebody in this landscape put a red tick once against that long forgotten corner.