BATTLEFIELD FARMS.

Taihape Daily Times, 18 July 1919, Page 7

BATTLEFIELD FARMS.

VVHAT IS BEING DONE.

'9 The battlefie-Ids‘of Fiance are al§ready becoming battlefield farms. If the old front line is to be preserved

as a place of pious pilgrimage then prompt action must be taken by the French -authorities, for there is every danger of the battlefields utterly disappearing (Writes Mr Roy Temple in the Daily Mail).

These are ‘the facts in Northerfi France. Three days ago I came “down the linc” for =t=he last time.

As tlle"~T6ng troop train ambled slowly through the war zone from Pcrenchics, outside Lille, ‘to Hazebrouck, I gazed for the last time on scenes rhade immortal by the v-alour -of British larms.

But how changed! Almost lihad to rub my eyes as I passed through fighting areas that I knew intimately for three years.

“Where was the old front line?” I asked a gunner friend as we napproaehed Armentieres of cheery memory. '

“I’m hanged if I can spot it,” he replied, as he put down his binoculars. Wire has disappeared. Gone are the trencli posts. The rus-ty debris of War has been cleared «away. Even the trenches have been filled in, -and the earth flattened. Dug-outs have been pulled down and the wood used for firewood or used for building purposes. The cause of it all‘? Gangs of German prisoners have been employed for‘ weeks in collecting and burning the debris: making salvage dumps of wire, corrugated iron, cartridge cases, rifles, and any old metal.

In addition, the French peasants

have come back. Their homes are broken and ruined. They build a little shack of corrugated iron and wood, propped up at the side of the 901 d far.'.;. They have rertull'l‘.‘lecl—\volxleli and children and a'll—-—to the old home. Quickly they set to work with French mc:t.llod and industry to re-make the fields from which they draw their livelihood. That is the miracle of this spring. _ _ _ A

What they have alreaqy achieved in obliterating the havoc of the war is second only ‘to the healing of Nature. What was a. brown desolation la.s'-t year is now ploughed land or green rank grass, M

' Isolated graves are, of course, 1111. touched. But these are not very numerous in this V?/"§ir area. It was latterly also the rule to bury our dead in a gravbyard specially set apart, with every grave regis=t:ered.

French oflicials may talk of preserving the battlefields. But the French peasant does not -talk or read much. He is a land-worker. He returned to his home as quickly as the Boche Went back in the autumn. A

“The war is finished,” he says, “and we must live.” Crops will ripen =this summer whore last year our men lay 111 the trenches.

So, when fathers, mothers, and wives stand in France where he stood, there will be lifftle, I fear, for them to see of what their loved "one saw. I am certain he would have it so. And‘ is not the French peasant ‘right?