ON THE BATTLEFIELD.

Shannon News, 9 January 1925, Page 4

ON THE BATTLEFIELD.

(By T.C.L.) PABIS, Oct. 29. We had been looking forward with interest to visiting the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France, we could not say with pleasure, for buried there were some who bad been near and dear to us. We had the good fortune i-i London to meet an old friena, the Rev. H. Mullineaux. M.C., who is the heao of the organisation known as at. Barnabas' Hostels Mission to the battlefields, which arranges and conducts i ours" of relatives of the fallen British to the military cemeteries of France and Flanders. It is doing a splendid work. By its efforts thousands and thousands of poorly-off mothers and fathers have been enabled to see the abiding places of their sons, whilst others, in a better financial position, have been able to make the trip under the best of conditions and without falling into the clutches of the human cormorants abounding in the region of the battlefields be'nt upon exploiting the sorrow of pilgrims. A Splendid Organisation. The mission has been filled a real need, and th e devoted staff, of which Padre Mullineaux is the inspiring head', is entitled to the gratitude of the nation for all it has done and is doing. Unfortunately of late the work of the Mission has been hampered through lack of funds, but it is to be hoped that the British public and particularly the colonial public, will not allow this splendid organisation to die out altogether and so expose indigent pilgrims and other visitors to the exactions of the merciless and soulless ghouls that abound in the neighbourhood of the battlefields. The padre, who had been our honoured guest when in our part of New Zealand a couple of years ago, at once offered to place his car at our disposal and personally conduct us over the battlefields, an offer which, of course, we were pleased to accept. So. we duly went across to Calais, where we were met by the padre and Mrs Barker, secretary of the hostels and the padres right-hand help. To pass through the Customs room of a French seaport is an experience no one can forget. The officials are all shouting and madly gesticulating at one and the same time; there is no system or order. Consequently he who can shout the loudest and push his way forward the most receives first attention, and, as most visitors are aware of this ' pandemtfaium reigns. The person who is deficient in a knowledge of the language and in the pleasant ways of the French officials, is pushed aside and left. We were therefore very thankful that we had friends to meet us who knew the run of the ropes. A -Dreary Journey.

After partaking of tea, real English tea that we were to know not again for many weeks to come, we started for Hazebrouck, our first objective, over cobbled roads that' rendered motor driving anything but pleasant, and fringed with rows of larches, poplars and other deciduous trees. The villages passed through were not impressive. The houses were eve'n more primitive than those in English villages, whilst the streets were narrow and tortuous, designed, it would seem,, to keep out all the sunshine and purifying draughts and winds. En route we passed St. Omer, for a time the headquarters of the British Army. One was struck by the absence of fences in the countryside. Farms ap-' peared to have no dividing lines, and there were no hedges abutting on to the roads. This was; so unlike rural England, through which we had just come, with ; its checker-like live hedges, and numerous clumps pf trees'. The reason was soon apparent. The French cultivator is frugal, and does not believe in wasting a foot of land, and hedges take up a considerable area. He has no need for fences in order to keep in his stock, for most of the cows are tethered, or in charge of a small boy or girl. Not that there is' much stock, for there seems very little about, and, a© for sheep, we did not see one either in Flanders or France. Only in the south of France, which we subsequently visited, did we see one flock, and that but a tiny one in folds. Beet on Hungry JLand. Most of the land was devoted to the growing of sugar®beet, which was in process of being dug and carted to factories that are dotted over the landscape pretty much in the same way as are dairy factories in our own country. In the fields could be seen men, women and Children, all evidently working against time. There was no "go slow" about them,'no slacking; those working near the road were too intent on their work even to bother to look up as you passed by: Was this a usual custom? The padre replied in the affirmative,' adding that were the British to manifest the same inlerest in their work ninety-flv G per cent, of their present economic problems would be solved.

The land seemed poor and hungry, as may be expected after centuries of intensive cultivation, and yielded poor crops of beet, notwithstanding the manuring that seemed to be an integral part of the French system of farming. One wondered how much greater would be the yield in New Zealand with its wonderful natural fertility, were the same intensive operations pursued. At the sam e time, one would not like to see our women folk and children condemned to a life that we would regard as sheer slavery. The effect on the faces of the French women was very noticeable—they were haggard and prematurely a#ed. By the time they are thirtyfive years of age they look like old women of sixty and seventy, so great is the strain and so hard is the life of the rural community. Hard Work to Live.

i The fact is that so poor is the land arid so rigorous the climate that t\\bie unfortunate people have all to work at their maximum i?a order to live, or

to exist, for their style of living is but existence. The fall of tne franc has not helped them; on the contrary: it has but added to the misery of their lot Goods and services are much dearer and the prices their beetroot and milk and butter command have not risen in proportion. For this they blame the British, who, in their ignorance, they seem to think have manipulated the world's finances in order to bring France down, when the fact is that xt is because of the French policy of refraining from taxing the people adequately and squaring the budgets by issuing more paper money I that the fall is d ue. The - French peasants think little of outside things. They seem to have little capacity for thinking at all—their life is so hard and grim as to deaden their mental faculties. But they all think that Britain possesses great wealth and has added to it, at the expense of the French, as the result of the war. We reached Hazebrouck bj nightfall. Though early in October the air was very, chilly, more so than you experience in the middle of our winters, and we were glad to reach our hotel. Hazebrouck is well known to our New Zealand boys, for many of them passed through and stayed at it on their way up to the front. It is an important railway centre. Because of it the Germans paid the station particular attention with their long range guns at particular periods in the early stages of the war, when the fate of Ypres to the north-east hung in the balance. The Allies could not understand how it was when troop trams were being assembled in the yards that the Huh heavies landed shell after shell on the station yards. They repeatedly altered their plans and dispositions, yet the Bosches"seemed to get to know of the alterations and arrange their fire accordingly. This went on for months. Evidently there was a spy at work and one well up. At last they discovered him in the act —it was none other than the .station- ' master himself who had been in the pay of the enemy. He received short shrift for his treachery.

A Worthy Cemetery. Flags were flying in Hazebrouck next morning, a Sunday, for one of the Cabinet Ministers was due to pay the town a visit, and Sundays are always selected for visits of this nature and galas generally. We were off next morning for Ypres, the British Verdun, which bur kith and kin had defended with such, consummate valour during the whole course of the war against the power and might of the German nation, and where, too, thousands of our own New Zealanders had laid down their lives. We proceeded by La Kraule and Steenvoorde, : which is near the border line, and where we were duly examined by Belgian gendarmes. Poperinghe lay ahead, but a:t Abeele we deviated in order to visit the Lijssenhoek cemetery (the old Remy siding) where many New Zealanders who succumbed to their injuries at the casualty clearing stations neaby, lie buried. This is one of the British cemeteries that have been completed. The work has been carried out well and faithfully. The cemetery is surround, ed by stone walls, with a stone entrance simple yet impressive in design, and, dominating the whole, the Cross of Sacrifice, dedicated to the memory of the fallen, inscribed with the words from. Ecclesiasticus: "Their names liveth or evermore." There are row on row of headstones, on which the names, etc., of the dead soldiers are engraved, and in about eighteen inches in front of the stones, flowersEnglish flowers for the most part—have been planted, and were blooming despite the. inhospitality of the climate and the poorness of the soil. The rest is green sward, kept closely 'cut and in a tidy condition. The gardeners tending the work, .all exService men, must be .imbued with a zeal, as well as a reverence for their task, or the cemetery would not be the beautiful spot it is in the midst of swampy, .sordid surroundings, where still is to be seen evidence of wreckage and devastation that even the greatest industry of the peasants has not yet entirely removed. Prom the Ends of the Earth.

In L<ijssenhoek cemetery are buried no fewer than 10,000 British, including many New Zealanders. Veritably "from the uttermost parts of the earth" they had come in the bloom of their manhood to help the forces of Right to triumph over those of evil, knowing only too well what was in front of them and the odds against their coming through unscathed or even with their lives. They did not hesitate to respond to the call for ser. vice. Here their remains lay, thousands and thousands of miles from their own beautiful land, alongside thousands of other equally brave men from all parts of the British Empire, a monument for all time of the indissolubility of an Empire that sta'ads for all that is best in the world—for honour, justice, and truth—and also providing mute yet eloquent evidence of the utter futility of war and a destroyer of all that is best and good in mankind. Yet in the cemetery are buried no aged failures; over it there hover the spirits of burning youth who dared and achieved so much that all through the ages to come pilgrims will go there to gain inspiration and strength,, to regain lost ideals, and to what duty means. There could' not be afforded a greater contrast. Here, as you swept your eyes around, you saw through the j clammy mist an inhospitable, tree- I less, unbeauiiful plain, dissected with small, slow-running streams and swamps; to the 'north the rising land of Passchendaele ridge of bloody memory; to the east gaunt looking Kemmel, the look-out tower of the British for so long. New Zealand with its open plains and rolling country, its beautiful bush and clear at- J mospherc. The o'ae vista uninviting J and unattractive in the extreme; the • other attractive Tn every respect, and j "homo." I

The Reverential Spirit. But the authorities have spared no expense or trouble in making tills

-God's acre" and . other cemeteries we were subsequently to visit as beau, tiful as conditions allow, and as the shrubs and trees that have been planted reach maturity they will be rendered even more attractive. But what a relative of the buried will appreciate is the reverential spirit that pervades the hallowed grounds, as expressed in the design of the entrances, monuments and headstones, and more particularly in the care bestowed on the grounds generally. We left the spot that for years it had beel our great desire to visit, satisfied that the authorities are discharging their duties to the British and overseas dead in no perfunctory and "official" way, but in a manner both sympathetic and reverential, showing that they are imbued with the spirit that the solemnity and sacredness of their charge occasions.

. We were to see many, many cemeteries in the neighbourhood, for this was at the back of the Ypres salient, where during the four and a half years of war -the British dead alone numbered 200,000. You have to see the cemeteries that closely stud this district to appreciate what this mea'ns. It brings home to you as nothing else can the cost of war and the enormity of Germany's crime in making war on mankind. Not a great -number are finished. Many are in process of making. Others are much the same as they were at the end of hostilities. The French and Belgians have left their cemeteries practically unattended, and they are consequently the reverse of impressive. Where they have attempted to improve them they have spoilt their efforts by a tendency to garishness, so unfitting to the British idea yet so indicative of the character of the French people. Dave Gallagher's Grave.

We proceed to Poperinghe vie "Nine Elms" cemetery, and stay to see poor old Dave Gallagher's grave. M Dave" was every- inch a man as he was a'n athlete, and played the game in war as he did football. Buried near him are other New Zealand men whose names were familiar. Padre Mullineux, it will be remembered, brought out Rugby team® to the colonies on two occasions, and played against Gallagher, with whom he struck up a warm, friendship. The padre saw not a little of his friend before his end, for the former was attached for some time to our forces, whom he greatly admired for their sporting, soldierly and manly qualities as typified in the person of the great All Black captain. His experiences in the battle areas were to prove very useful to us, as he was able to explain the plans of battle and the part taken by our fellows, also to go over the very ground over which they fought with v such conspicious gallantry, rescourse and success.

Poperinghe, like so many towns and » villages in the war zone, suffered a good deal from enemy bombarmment, I I-lit to-day it is much like what It was j before the war, the bulldrngs damag- ' od or destroyed being repaired or re- I built. No attempt, however, has been made to profit by the architectural or ■town planning errors of the past or by the lessons of the present. This curious feature was to be even more'emphasised in the towns we were later to visit the active process of reconstruction which with industry and determination, truly remarkable, since been completely' rebuilt. After Vlamertinghe* we passed the Moat \ Farm that for some time served as a dressing-station.