Somme Battlefield.

Taihape Daily Times, 23 March 1918, Page 6

Somme Battlefield.

WILDERNESS OP DEATH

WHAT THE GERMANS HAVE DONE

France, December 21

Across a silent country to the north, as far as the eye could see, there stretched wave after wave of land bare of trees, bare of houses, of cultivation, bare of men or women or little children, bare of any useful standing or living or moving thing. A rusty grass in the foreground blew about on the shaggy flanks of the hilside in the cold breeze, like th'e long winter coat of a horse. Half a mile away on the skyline was a short grey stubble of perhaps a hundred colourless tree trunks, without a single branch or twig among them. There was scarcely even a bird moving or singing in that silence. The land lay under the sun with the silence of death. It was the land which 12 months before had been the battlefield of the Somme. The old trenches wander up and down those bleak uplands like the veins in the hand. The parapets are long since covered, and the sandbags burst for the most part. Labourers from every country have collected the wire, the old rifles, the bombs, the shell-cases, the telegraph Poles, many 0 f the unexploded shells, even the planking of the old corduroy roads. The country is uninhabited by its own people to-day from a line further back than the old front line before the battle, right away to the line where the battle joins, along the Hindenburg trench, to-day. i n the part where the Germans retreated in the spring, and the ground is not so battle-smashed, there still stand such broken houses' as the Germans left, and a few partly felled woods. But they are like the ghosts of a deserted land, where no crops grow and where the natural grasses spring wild and unkempt around the

bare walls and blackened naked framework of the a'oofs. They did let the people of the Somme back into it once. I remember a trainload of 'them arriving, laughing and chatting at Albert, and then stringing out next day along the familiar roads to their villages on the Somme battlefield, places they had not seen for three years. They had heard that .they were destroyed—they had seen Albert with its shelltorn houses; they had seen photographs in the papers of other villages with great gaps in roofs and walls, splintered doorways, bricks tumbled across the streets, torn, ragged wallpaper flaping in strips on the sunlit walls. They fcnew that .they would find ruin in their homes.

But they thought that they would find their homes. They looked for trees, and there were none. They came to tho village of .La Boiselle, where the road had forked 'near the pretty cemetery and wound past tho little stone church, through houses and gardens—and there was only a bare hillside of ploughed chalk and wild mallow. One elderly man had set his face for his oldhomc in the village of Pozieres; he had been half dreading the day and half-looking forward to it. But this country bewildered him. He hurried onwards up the long Roman road toward the rolling hill-top, anxious to reach his old landmarks— tho main street on the hill crest and the village pond and great trees and sideroads; which he knew so well, and the ruinshe knew they would be ruins—of his own house. ITe could not find them nor the trace of them. He could not find his own house nor his neighbour's house—he could not say where they had existed. He could not say where he stood in his own village. He could not see any sign of any house —the church, the school, the gardens were gone as if they had never existed. The old chap sat down upon a mound. Here was the day ho j had promised himself—the day when | he should go back and see his homo j

The old follow sat down on a hour)

by the roadside and cried

—■——■■ '" * One thinks of the man who brought this upon the world —tho man who has made that wild waste of what three years ago were smiling fields and nestling villages—the man who could have saved the world from three years of holocaust had he chosen so much as to raise his little finger.