WHAT FRANCE HAS SUFFERED.

Taihape Daily Times, 25 November 1918, Page 3

WHAT FRANCE HAS SUFFERED.

Sir Edward Carson thus describes a visit to the war zone in France:— No written account can enable one to conceive the frightful devastation that has been wrought by the Germans. You may read of defiled and ruined churches, of crumbled villages, of destroyed woods, of deserted fields pitted with water-bogged shell-holes, but not the most vivid imagination can picture the reality which these phrases try to describe. Even when one stands on the ground itself, among thistles kneedeep and stretching in every direction as far as sight, aided by field-glasses, can reach, and when one tries to thread one’s way between holes, the smallest of which would hold a taxi-cab and the largest a church, it is difficult to believe that what looks like a vast expanse of rough moor or fen, covered with every conceivable kind of litter and filth, and without a sign of human habitation or human care, was, until the coming of the Hun, a rich plateau of wheat and rye, of beet and potatoes, of hops and apples and plums, with bright little clusters of gardened cottages, of which it is now difficult even to find a trace by searching among the rank weeds for th\i lime and brick dust that alone mark the site of former prosperous village life. My one regret is that this abominable desolation cannot be witnessed by every Englishman. if there be any such, who for one moment tolerates the idea of a peace without full reparation. This wilderness cannot, at all events for some generations to come, be made to blossom again like the rose. It will probably be afforested, if it can be sufficiently levelled even for such use.

What is to become of its former inhabitants no one knows. Many families have disappeared altogether. The men have been killed; the women who survived have been deported. In other cases they are refugees to other parts of Franco, where they have managed to find some sort of subsistence, and where they will 'probably remain permanently. Occasionally some owners are allowed to make a temporary return to search for buried, perhaps, in garden" hr orchard, which are but rarely be found, since it is almost impossiblif "’to. 1 detemine even the site of any particular plot of ground how merged in the surrounding wilderness. Germany has suffered none of this terrible devastation, and has had the advantage of carrying on this destructive work on the soil of Belgium and France along the Western front. No reparation, can ever make good what.Germany’^£riipe against humanity has destroyed: but no one can witness the work of Jfche Hun without vowing that the .‘.reparation shall be as complete aS France and her Allies can exact from, the despoiler.