ENTIRELY CHANGED

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 368, 1 November 1932, Page 7

ENTIRELY CHANGED

SOMME OF TODAY memoriatjs" ! only remaining evidence of war. LAND UNDEiR CULTIVATION. With the unveiling of the great Thiepval Memorial hy the Prince of Wales recently, the last of the monuments set'up by the Impeidal War Graves Commission to ' the British dead in the Great War was dedicated (statos the Paris correspondent of the London Obesrver). It will then he possible to say that of the one million one hundred thonj sand officers who gave their lives; [ there' will hot be a single name which I is not carved somewhere, either upon ! his own headstone in a war cemetery j or an English' country chnrchyard or I upon one of these great architectural j monuments in the case' of those; whose indiyidnal graves cannot he traced. I From now onwards the- War Graves Commission will, of eourse, continue ' to he responsible for the upkeep of the | cemeteries and' memorials, but" its cre- | ative worh will be at an end. j These memorials, whieh are to be 1 seen to-day at various poirits along a relatively narrow band of country, which was once the fighting !line, h'ave come to serve another purpose than that of the commemoration- of nohle sacrifice and heroic d'eeds.- If it were not for their presence it would- hardly be possible to say where trenches ' once were. The face of the country is entirely ■ cthanged from what it was when armistice left it a desert of mud and splintered tree stumps. Except for a few patches where old shell cases and metal are still being dug up — patches which it has become almost difficult to hnd and which certainly do not detach themselves from the general view of the landscape — the whole land has returned to agriculture. Villages which were not only- dostroyd hy shell and bomb, but whose ruins were thr'own into the roads by engineers to form ballast to carry heavy Arrny transport, have risen again. Little Reaff orestation. It requires an ohserver who already knows where to look for the trench line itself to he able to trace it today, and that he can only do it in the early spring when a slightly different tone in th^i growing corn, caused by an otherwise imperceptible variation of level and consequently of angle of light and shadow, makes it possible for him to map out a plan which so rnany company commanders knew by heart fifteen years ago. Trees have grown up again, some of them from' the old stumps and others planted sinoe the armistice, but as hone of the latter can he more than fifteen years old from the time they were seedlings; this strip of landscap-e possesses a peculiar character, for it has none of the fine timber which almost covered it before 1914. Even though trees have been planted along the road, there has been very little afforestation. The Arras Memorial carries the names of ' 35,000 soldiers who f ound unknOwn graves in that area, and of a thousand airmen who fell at various points on the Western Pront and were never traced. The Thiepval memorial carries over 73,000 names of men who have no individual graves, which is more hy 20,000 than appear on any other British monument.