THE SOMME INFERNO.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 May 1917, Page 6

THE SOMME INFERNO.

THE LAST WORD IN WAR! A RECORD OF HUN FRIGHTFULNESS (By Frank H. Simmond3, in the- New York Tribune). Before I visited the battlefield of the Somme I had gone to tho scene of the great battle of Champagne, the scene of the French attack of September in that year, which was the first of the great allied efforts. Nothing could be more interesting and instructive than to compare the progress of man in tho art of destruction in one short year. When the French began that early attack the world was filled with the story of til-' terribleness of their preliminary bombardment; it passed all preceding bombardments in human history. Yet a year and a-half after, standing on ground still under German fire (for the German lines are but a mile back of the point at which the French advance began), standing in the village square of Souain, you see that the walls cf the hamlet remain; the church tower is a tangible if ruined entity. Walk oivc from the village a few rods and you come to the French lines from which, in the battle of 'ls. some thousands of Frenchmen rose and attacked—"went oyer tho top," as the British say.

GERMAN DUG-OUTS INTACT IN - CHAMPAGNE WASTE. . From these old French lines you can walk a hundred feet, and you will come to the first-line trenches of the Germans in the Champagne battle-line. Good, solid trenches, as well built as are all the German field works, and wholly imdestroyed; the deep dug-outs just as they were when the Germans warmed up to meet the first lines of tho French. Just outsifle Souain, in the cemetery, the lines approach until they literally divide a tomb, and they are as good to-day as ever, save as there has been soma erosion, some/wearing away due to weather. All the terrible bombardments that filled tho world with its noise neither destroyed nor seriously mutilated these works! It stripped off :he barbed wire, and that was all. And because tins was all that bombardment could do, then the battle of Champagne was a French failure. The German lines were not cut clean through. The contrast on the battlefield of the Somme is indescribable. Over an area 10 miles by 20, perhaps,, the whole face of the earth' has' been changed, the heart of the hills has been blown out. You look up the slope of a considerable hill, you climb with difficulty up its rounding slope, and suddenly you gaze down into a chasm, a volcano's crater. All the interior of th<! hill has been blown out by a mine The hillside is an empty 'shell. An ocean liner could be concealed ,in the crater. DEATH'S ROAD LEADS TO MODERN , POMPEII. Coming out of Albert along the road so mam' thousands of men have followed to death, one approaches the field ot actual fighting with little real warninpr. Albert itself is a shelled, half-destroyed town. The tower of its church, with a statue of the Virgin suspended in a prostrate position across the. town, has become a thing familiar to all who have read of the battle. When it falls, 10 the people of the region believe, peace will come. But Albert is only a shelled town. Many of its houses stand; most of them retain their walls and many their roofs. But a mile the other side cf Albert, travelling towards Peronn-, one comes suddenly out upon the most terrible and bewildering scene of desolation it is possible to imagine.. From the upper layer of the earth there has been swept away not alone the trees, the sod, the outer covering, but the very depth of the lower strata have been churned up and scattered about. Of a sudden, in tho midst of the landscape of Picardy. with smiling valleys and pleasant woodlands, there is»,the image of.'the Sahara, of something more than the Sahara—of the fields above Pompeii or Messina, down which have flowed the streams of lava; which not only engulf but endure.

.ONLY SKELETON LEFT WHERE A ' HILL' stood:

Turning off the main road one leaves the car and climbs heavily up a hillside. Along this hillside, ran the first, line of German trenches, but now,there are neither trenches nor semblance of i tranche?. This hill,and all the surrounding hills are worked by shell-fire until they resemble nothing so much as the pictures of the surface of the moon, familiar to all who recall the geographies of their. youth. The flesh of the hills has been swept away; only the skeleton remains! Occasionally, where the slope'of the hill is undulating, the suggestion of a German dugout remains—perhaps a dugout overwhelmed by the first deluge of fire, and still holding in its unexplored deptiis the scores 'of Germans who- inhabited it when the avalanche arrived. All over the. hillside, too, is the litter of war—unexplodefl shells,, the fragments of bombs, the debris of earlier and later camps. Always, too, wherever there is a bit of level ground, are graves, endless graves, graves placed without order and without system—the graves dug by men pressed with the need to get forward,' compelled to lav aside allregard for the ceremony of inhumation. FRONTIER OF DESOLATION IS OUTLINED SHARPLY. . From the hill of Mametz one looks Westward beyond the battlefield. Across a little ravine the opposite'slope rises, still but little scarred: The frontier of desolation is exactly marked; it is as plain to the- eye as if it were indicated upon a map. But looking westward over miles and mile 3 there is nothing but the wild scene of desolation. The surface of hill and valley has been swept away; it is as if the outer and the inner strata of the earth had in some fashion changed places. It is a destruction suggctsing that of Sodom and Gomorrah—a destruction deliberately designed to make impossible for ever the return of men to their old field. I do not know any way that one can give any slight hint of the desolation of the battlefield of the Somme. There it lies, 10 miles deep, ono shore touching the furnace which is still burning up and destroying the surface of the earth and all animate and inanimate things thereon. At the other shore there begins sharply/ the countryside of France, and between the.two shores is an infernal reprion in which at least a million and.a-lialf of men —British) German, and French —have been killed or wounded. Perhaps half n million men lie buried in the shattered folds and turns of the scarred hillsides or in the flats be>*ie'the little brooks. •■'_■. VILLAGE OF MAMETZ SWEPT OFF THE EARTH. . Sometimes in the' Sunday supnlemonts scientists, .or alleged scientists, iiseij to write arttoki desmbinjtjhejto* JrbsttJ

the earth would begin to dry up, when flames from inside the narrow crust would burst forth. What they sought to describe the artillery of the last great war has illustrated on the slopes of the Picardy hillsides. Standing still on the slopes of the Mametz Hill, on the slopes towards the north and cast one looks out upon the sites of many villages. At your feet was Mametz, but of Mametz there is not a stone, not a fragment. It has not been buried; it has been literally blown from the face of the earth; it has dissolved in dust, and the dust has been swept away. Here was a well-built little French town, with its solid houses of plaster and stone—old houses enduring from other centuries. It had tho usual church, the familiar place,-, the fountain, all the slight but permanent details of a- French village, and now there is just nothing. And what is true of Mametz is true of Montauban; it is true of Fricourt; it is true of I do not know how many more villages. They are gone, and sometimes the hills upon which they stood are gone. On the map you will see marked many little bits of woodland, the usual communal grove or the inevitable clump of trees surrounding the frequent chateaus. But the woods are gone.

BIG WOODS OBLITERATED IN REGION OF VERDUN. I saw the same thing a'; Verdun, when I visited Fort de -Vaux before I went to' the Somme. There, half a dozen of the woods that have filled the battle reports have vanished—'Bois de Latifee, Chenois, Capitre—they arc gone, and there are left neither stumps nor stump holes;' the ground out of which they grew has been worked into a mass of 'holes, huge cavities in which men and animals have disappeared and been drowned. Thi.3 new artillery fire does not wreck; it does not even pause with obliteration;' it alters the very surface and the subsurface; it raises news hills and it destroys old elevations. And when the armies are gone and the war ends (for even this war must end some time) it is interesting', if tragic, to think what will be tlio emotions of all the little people who inhabited these regionß, people who, faithful to the French love for the land, will lctiirn to their old homes. And of their old homes they will find not even a fragment; the fields that they cultivated and that their fathers cultivated will have disappeared; the subsurfcee will still be honeycombed by the corridors of mines or the molelike burrows of the dugouts.

MALIGNANT WAR SPIRIT BLIGHTS LAND FOR EVER. I do not think one can get any conception of the real terror of this war who has not seen the country of the Somme or of Verdun, who has not soon the fashion in which this war, like n malignant war spirit, has not alone destroyed all that then; was of homes of human habitation and of the fields of human effort, but has swept the earth with fire and sown it with salt, as if in the determination that there should never again be life, that men should not exist or fruit and foods grow in the fields over which it had passed. Yet it is not alone the sense of destruction that one feels at the Somme. Indeed, I think tho sense of human industry, of enormous effort of innumerable men at their tragic task of war, even passes the impression of desolation. Take one of the large anthills that one sometimes sees in a country field, draw a rake deeply through its curved summit and watch the myriad of ants come swarming up and begin what seems a mad and frantic outburst of industry, and you will have some faint suggestion of what the battlefield of the Somme is like.

INDUSTRY AMID RUIN WROUGHT BY DESTROYER. For in spite of the desolation there is no lack of population, there is no lack of human activity. Indeed, looking down upon any section of the field it suggests pictures that one sees of some great engineering operation—the removal of a mountain, the transformation of some square miles of the surface of the earth, a labor like that of Panama. For gridironed amidst all the waste are railroad tracks, the bottom of every valley is carpeted with rails,- and the noise of the distant artillery is deadened by the shrill whistles of engines as they drag cars up toward the front—towing the railhead — ithe "dump" of the military argot. And beside the railroads are highways, the white, even, and splendid highways of France. They alone have survived the ruin, as the stones of the Appian Way have outlicd the centuries and the onrush of other barbarians. And along these highways flow the most amazing streams of mankind that are conceivable; and not alone men, but motors and horses. The voice of the Missouri mule challenges the passage of the "tank," and the donkey that of the pack train. FLOWER OF BRITAIN IN CONTINUOUS MARCH.

Up these roads, following their artillery, surrounding their rolling kitchens. the men of Australia and of Canada movo between those of Scotland and of England. And the roads are crowded day and night like the roads tiint lead to the polo grounds when a ball game is scheduled. And on the shell-swept hillsides every sort of shanty and barrack affords temporary resting-place for the mender of highways or police of the rear. It is as if the flower and pick of British imperial manhood had suddenly sought a dwelling-place in the desert. And the impr-esison is 'bewildering beyond all else I have ever seen. Here are some square miles of the earth's surface which have been swept and torn and wrecked by shell, by' the fury of the weapons invented by man; and the men who have done these things with the maddest of all energy, with the most terrible of all machines, have now come forward to restore to human use what they have just destroyed. First they have created a wilderness, and worse than a wilderness, and then they have fared forward into the wilderness, bringing with them all the machinery they could devise—not to repair all the injuries they have wrought, but such of these injuries as! arc hampering their purpose, which purpose is to get forward swiftly and turn still more miles of France into the same c?ntre of desolation.

SCENE OF DESTRUCTION TO LIVE FOR CENTURIES. I do not know how anyone can quite describe this battlefield of the Somme ao that the man "who lives in peace on this side of the Atlantic can understand it or grasp something of the supreme insanity and the- supreme intelligence which are both unmistakable there. I am sure that centuries from now men and women will go to this place to see the surviving evidences of the storm .that blighted it a year ago. I havo never seen anything that approached the torriblcness of the sight, save about Verdun. Yet an engineer, a man interested in the moving of mountains of the transformation of val- ' .leys'"'to human ends, would look down 'also? ujjbn these fieldsito-day and see an oaian. Jlf,.

human genius and human system, which would take him completely- and command his admiration. Tho saddest and most completely wasted comer of a valley may conceal a terminal station that would make an operating railroad man jealous, A New York policeman, a traffic man, used to the problems of Fifth avenue ana Forty-second street, might shrink from the task of separating and ordering the stream that flows through what was once the main street of Montauban and is now a white road in the midst of powdered ashes.

DESTRUCTION ADVANCES LIKE A FOREST FIRE. And like tho forest fires of the north, destruction advances —steadily, surely. The road below the, hill at Mametz passes Montauban, Gillmont, Ginchy; it reaches Combles, it arrives at Sailly-Saillisel, which is now the extreme front, but tomorrow the flamos will pass Sailly-Sail-lisel. And when the storm has passed, then the railroad and the highway will push forward, more men will come with tools and with machinery, and they will reclaim to their own purposes this land that has been deluged with steel, torn by mines, watered by the blood of thousands and thousands of men coming from the uttermost parts of the earth and ej.'i hauating their resources, first of destruction and then of reconstruction. Last summer we used to wonder why the British advance was so slow. Ido not think one wonders when one clambers with difficulty up tho steep slopes of one hill and sees beyond this hill after lull, valley after valley; not great hills, but sharp and steep hills, all now like to nothing so much as the deserted nest of hornets, along whose slopes there may still' be traced in places the cuttings of the trenches and tangles of barbed wire. "TANK" FITS INTO SCENE AS A SYMBOL OF FURY. Beyond Mametz, at Trones Wood, my' givide showed me a "tank," disabled and lying beside the road. Oddly enough, it seemed to me the only really appropriate thing in the whole accursed region roundabout. It seemed animal rather than mechanical, like a prehistoric animal, and it was not difficult to imagine that all the scene of desolation that extended on every side was the work of this animal, of many animals such as this; that there was still going forward the war of some prehistoric age between man and this scaled creature, and that in its fury, its dying fury—for this "tank" was dead—it had torn up the Trones Wood, lashed about itself, and overturned trees and rooted then up. One more detail. All this field of contrasting waste and reconstruction is well within reach of German shell fire. Now and again the storm begins, and the caravans of men and animals slowly extend, draw out into thin groups—and go on. It never stops by day or by night, this steady, even flow of human life toward the extreme front at which annihiliation becomes absolute, at an arbitrary frontier of sandbags. . . :...■■>,. .',.,.,;,, , STEADY BOMBARDMENT RESEMBLES EARTHQUAKE. The centre of the storm has passed, but the storm area includes all of tho torn and wrecked country, and always there is to be heard, not distant, the steady drumming of heavy artillery; the hills are shaken almost every moment by the tremendous explosions, and the intermittent cannonade rifles to the magnitude of an earthquake again and again A year ago I visited the field of the Maine. Here there was nothing of destruction visible that mig'-.t not have been the work of the men and the machines that fought Napoleon on the same ground a century before. On the battlefield of Champagne, of 1915, as I have- said, the effect of shellfire was patent but temporary; the walls of houses stood, and the fields can be ploughed and planted when the trenches are filled and the barbed wire removed. But at the Somme there is nothing more terrifying in all the terrible things that one sees than tne mutilation of the surface of the earth itself, the permanent destruction of the 'hills, and the lasting scarring of the hillsides, sown as they are with shattered fragments of half a million of human beings and condemned to eternal sterility." Surely the Somme must be th'? last word in war.