THINGS SEEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 27 September 1917, Page 6

THINGS SEEN.

FROM FLANDERS TO AI.SACE. SOME VIVID PICTURES. (By J. L. Garvin in London Observer). It is so much easier to realise the war when von are not there. When you are there no pinching will quite convince you that what is passing ia not a vast illusion. On thfc Sussex hills early in Juno one hail heard the puns in Flanders thudding through the whole of a biue still day. About a fortnight later a bosom-friend and I left England in dull weath"r. It was a historic ship. It happened to carry not only General Allenby going out to take tile Gaza Command, but General Pershing, whose landing on the other side of the Channel would so soon be a definite pledge of epoch-making events. Erect on deck, looking steadily over towards France, the American Com-mander-in-Chief, with that clasped mouth and trenchant profile, seemed a man likely to set a hard grip on any task.

As for the French port, imagine Brighton with docks added and turned into a war-base, thronged with lurtnels, railway wagons, marching khaki, and long ranges of motor-cars. We spin away in one of them to the Chateau which is headquarters for most visitors to the British front. From other quiet country houses miles from the battle-fronts the fight is directed. Next day we went over the battlefields of the Sorame. From the red tower of the broken church at- Albert, high over the weedy abandonment and uncouth heaps of what was once a town 6<piare, the colossal gilded Madonna, now prevented from falling, leans outward and downward, like a figure in flight from heaven to earth, and seems to hold out the Babe over all humanity. A chance stroke of war has created one of the strangest, most moving symbols in the world.

That route will always be a road of pilgrimage for our race. It was a day of rain and cloud, with gleaming intervals. Where were lively villages and nestling woods and rich tillage there i 3 now nothing fair that came from the hand of man. There is nothing left but names like trumpets. Who shall describe tho dreary waste which now stretches mile on mile? We passed the squat hmnps of debris, the gaping mine-mouth, where once were Ovilliers and La Boisselle. Away on the ridge towards Pozieres and Thiepval some of those devoted workers under General Fabian Ware, to whom the country and the Dominions never can be grateful enough, were seen dimly on the skyline still searching for the dead of providing mole decent burial and care Near Contalmaison, Mametz, Bazentin, Martinpuich, and High Wood, the thin, withering, forlorn trunks that remain where goodly forests stood, straggled ill skeleton files under the driving cloud. No matter how often you see them they are weird. Many of the old roads, like the villages, are erased. Busting huts are by the wayside. Viper--I'gh twists and curls of barbed wire, garments, shell-eas'es, broken rifles, water--bottles. iron helmets, cast boots are scattered everywhere. Amongst the ' graves marked and above the dead unj found walk like Agag here. The ground I js full of live bombs and shells.

And this was the first stern arena tvhere the New Armies battled for every varii and were very great. Imagine stretching far and wide dry pits and waterholi-. studded with littl-j burial mounds, strewn with iron sheds and litter as with the remains of some rail■vav siding long ago abandoned after an explosion. But now there is wild magic working. Primitive (nature is loose i«am, smoothing the sides of the shellimles, patting the trenches, covering the ivhole of this fateful and immortal around with the tender grace and frank beauty of new growth. Everywhere in t}ie world tall thistles and nettles will resettle their ancient sway, if they are allowed, but Here are bold poppies, deep cornflower, wild mustard, thvmc and the rest—dense tangles of bloom, strong flashes of color, the red, the blue, the rellow, the whole tossing palette .The spirit of earth is weaving patterns of bright wonders and robing our dead as kings. In this wilderness, halt dreadful and half gay, whether we find some one spot we search for or find it not,—but it must be hard by—they who rest here rest well. They were above all that was ever dreamed of uttermost courage, honor, truth to something above self:

"This way have men come out of brutishness To spoil the letters of the sky and read A reflex upon earth else meaningless." From that lonely, fatal valley between Bazentine. Martinpuish, and what was onee High Wood, we drove through the fragments of Combles and the strewinga of other places to the husk of Peronne. ft was an ancient and comfortable little citv with more private motor-ears per head <rf the population than any other provincial town in France. But the Boche before his retreat, plundered, burned, and wrecked. The noble mediaeval church has reeled and collapsed upon ,'ts own lower arches; within its roofless [walls and aisles half-standing you tlimb heaps of tumbled stone?. The threatbare faerie of the upper part of tho Hotel de Ville topples crazily over its colonnade. Catherine do Poix's pedestal ■—she was the local Jeanne d'Arc—has lost its fctatue. The houses even of streets that seem to remain fairly intact are methodically gutted row on row. Let us apologise (o Attila and his original Huns, and remember what this war nieuto. No tourist will ever -co the Peronne that was. Wa returned by other villages that merely have been; and yet the sky tad cleared, and in the full light of a summer afternoon the reaches of the Somrne .shone blue. How different was the next day, charged with (he living sense of power and action. Tn a high-perched town —with neat windmills and clipped round trees out of a toy-box—a vigorous soldier explained the battle of Messine=. The successive barrages, halts, advances were placed anil timed precisely as determined fully a fortnight before. On this occasion event= in every detail answered to thorough forethought, ft was thunder and earthquake according to liradshaw — probably the best-planned and most smoothly executed battle in British history. We went to the very atene. First from a bill quite near we saw the long tawny ridge which had been upheaved In- our mines, battered by our gun? with a tire six time? as heavv as the Somme bombardments and stormed by our men. It was a brilliant day. with chasing shadows. It .'ant, Where Messines once embraced a larje community, only a blur, & «mvid£e, U left. Aw»y on Jke

left the ghostly fragjnents of Ypres glimmered clear nliovo the lake and copses of Diekebusch.

A couple of miles further brought us right on to the field of the battle a fortnight after it had been fought. Elsewhere the craters are lip to lip or they run into each other. Here the thick tempest) of shells threshing every yard over and over again has made hoii'a and then unmade them, has so smashed down thi' ribs between the pits, has so churned and whirled and mined the clods and wads of earth that the ravage makes a more even compost. Destruction here obliterates its own first processes. The ground is just disfigured, contorted, kneaded ami dead. This beaten surface yawns here and there with mine-gulfs, large and deep as old quarries with a livid blue heart to them. At Spanbroek Molen the gulf is a hundred yards across. It was made by the biggest mine that ever went up in war. The ground is full of wareggs, big and little, that ljiay hatch horribly at a touch of your foot. Barbed wire writhes and squirms on the ground. Shell-cases, cartfidges, all the shabby rags and jetsam of war are kicking about. Out of this desert bristle thk> sticks and stumps of Wytschaete and other woods. The guns are clanging and the shells screech over our heads. The working parties push on with tile new roads, though a German crump sends the dust and smoke spouting up hardly fffty yards from a crossing we have just passed and repassed.

And then a drama, quick as lightning, priceless as a spectacle. Two German aeroplanes swoop out over our lines like hawks towards where our contemplative "sausages" are in upper air. Our antiaircraft guns crash from all sides and rake the sky. The mid-blue i 5 dotted with shrapnel pud's like stars at noonday. It is as enchanting as exciting. A piece of shrapnel pitches a yard away and swishes through the dust. The German airmen sweep round and, for once, escape. It passes as swiftly as thought, but life and death have played at touch-and-go. It is something to have stood under a little bit of the veritable war. There was much else in this day. It would deserve a whole page to its own self.

Only as much might be said of the following day and every other. I must not dwell on nine-tenths of tho tilings that tempt the pen. On a bright Sunday morning, when little French girls were all in white and our Catholic soldiers were marching to attend Mass in French churches, we set out for scenes as renowned as any in the war. A valley with grassy downs like Box Hill, only barer. The lofty blanched ruin of a great church with tall stiff fragments of wall perilously balanced like crude and aimless jiinnacles. Around the dumps of rubbish and lowly shells of brick that were houses. This was Albain St. Xazaire. The height above is no less a place than Notre Dame de Lorette. We climb. The breezy top is seamed with trenches amongst the overgrowth. Mouldering equipment lies all about and here and there the bones of men. Below, the industrial plain spreads away beyond the horizon. We see Lens, only four miles off. Near by we feel rather than see Loos of desperate memory. A hundred colliery villages with their tall pitgear and slag pyramids dot these faint green levels stretching like a still sea into the distant mist and smoke which ' holds Lille. For we. are on the very rim of Flanders, looking over now into what our forebears called simply the Low Countries. No wonder that when Foen's army more than two years ago stormed this crest and saw the view they shouted with exultation and thought that they would end the war in their next stride.

These thumb-nail drawings I begin tc perceive would take more room if continueil than this one article can give. Let us'sketch smaller and, as it were, on the nail of the little finger. The dun height over there is Vimy of resounding name. Even from here it looks rough, scarred, full of holes and burrows. It is slightly lower than where tve are standing, but was a wicked barrier across the straight road to Lille and Ghent. Our big batteries are Hashing and slamming in the hollow. British shells are skying their heavy traffic over Vimy and roaring like railway trains. They will dump into the Hindenburg ■line. We can now go a bit of the way with them and sec where they fall. We pas? what was Souchez. Slab, smooth destruction—thev have c'°"T?d up much bricky rubbish and are still shovelling with jags of broken timbers, wheels, gates, while the wrecked boilers and girders of the sugar refinery isprawl lonely. Long familiar with trio large maps of all this, you had imagined the Souehez river to be a stream of respectable width. You find it a busy brook which you could almost jump. Then, leaving the green ground for the battered/while the guns are louder and louder, yon scramble up the Vimy Ridge itself, trench to trench, from ledge to ledge, into the mid-nightmare of° this livid, stiffened, gouged, and tortoured scene spectral at high noon. You clamber over endless (scaly humors. By paths like ribs you wind amongst innumerable pits, greenish, or red, or iridescent, most witch-like and foul. The hard knobs and funnels of the cold moon cannot be so strange. When you see what has happened here to the obliterated Boche Canada's triumph lives again It is very hot and sunny. From the summit you see the plain again. Lens is much nearer now. The guns of both sides are at work out there, with fountains of dust springing like little dark geysers round a steaming cloud of whits smoke. Behind the German line peeps »)uuai steeple. The British Army will get there. Next day into Arras betimes. Shells still drop into it and smash another house or two. Our guide was shaving the other morning when a twelve-inch shell landed outside the window while neighboring walls disappeared. Another shell blew a man into a tree. On the day of our visit, however, nothing tested our iron helmets. The old quarter is even msre shattered than one had feared. The cathedral was modern, massive, and banal, but even that ruin has grandeur, towering above the broad, grass-grown steps of its front terraces. 'The Hotel de Ville—alas! that was a rarer treasure, a happy masterpiece £>f rich and soaring Gothic. It is none. Over the crushed walls the belfry tha4 survived centuries of other wars, has tumbled down, and the air knows it no more nor the chimes that rang for generations. On one half-wall a sculptured frieze of comic masks has escaped and i grins irony. The once jolly little square, with its stepped gables, is defaced and sad. Let us go. We disappear into the , bowels of the earth. Jf I could only say more about that. When ive coine ; up we walk eastward over more old tren- ; ches and more old wire and see where [ the shells are bursting near Monehy. Afterwards troops, horses, mules, lorries > crowd on every side. This is a focus of . strong ivar.

Another journey took a whole day Amongst our cemeterie; aiong the shore. A dancing, green-blue, foam-flecked sea ««»> breezes over the strange Land of

Wooden Crosses. On one white "shoulder of tlie dunes a small windy God's Acre looks straight over the Channel towards home. At Etaplecs there were nearly GOOO crosses steeped in the tranquil light of early evening, and every cross was doubled by its shadow. Here, folded together as you walk down the rows, are officers and men from all parts of our land, from all the Dominions. This will 1m a sacred place always for the whole English-speaking world. The main railway to 'Paris runs past it. The genius of men like Mr. John Sargent and Mr. Lutvens should see to it that the memorial which must some day rise here shall be great and worthy. This is going to become a big question, and therfe must bo 110 mistake. 'Banality must not impose its monuments on this ground. A long, slow journey from Abbeville to Paris—the train, like all trains, crammed with French soldiers. The enemy's recent activities threatened hitches in the expected tour. The French authorities with infinite courtesy smoothed away every difficulty. The long programme was arranged which made France and the cause of France even dearer to us than before and that is saying much. We came to a stately little town of Napoleonic memories and started for a journey through the regions devastated bv the Germans in their retreat, y It Aas the first of crowded days. Crossing the Aisne River, at Choisv-au j ßac, where our Old Contemptibles once broke down the bridge, we travelled through the long deep forests of the Aigue. The army which had swarmed in it. for two and a half years had flitted onjvards. At Sempigny we crossed the Oise End the canal where the locks are down. Quaint old Noyon, Charlemagne's and Calvin's Noyon, is little hurt. But at Guiscard the road turns. We are soon driving for thirty miles through the incredible evidence of things for which the Boche never can be forgiven while there is conscience in mankind, still less by th? peasant nation wlipse toil from dawn to eve in field and orchard had made all this land as bountiful as fair. It is the methodical murder of Nature as well a 6 the dwellings and monuments of man. The careful devil has been abroad here. For mile after mile the fruit trees lit> dead. Either they are prone, all laid out queerly in the same direction, or the Boche has hacked and sawn them nearly through, a yard from tie ground, until the rest of the tree fell backward to earth, though still attached to the stump by one ghastly sfrip of Lark. Ho has sawn with two-handed saws on both sides of the road. He has hacked far out in the fields. Apple and pear ana cherry they lie in thousands on thousands. The infernal work is hideously precise and regular. It puts a kink into the brain. How the lark sings this shining day. and there is no thunder of God. Yet do you thank God for all <he munition workers of the Allies and for the fibre of their peoples. Prince Eitel Frita, the fattest Philistiqe of the Kaiser'i common brood, revelled in the rustic pavilion on the mound of Bois l'Abbe, surrounded by its moat. On the slopes, beside the ramp, across the moat the apple trees are all down, and lie brist> ling, withered. From the top you look afar towards the misty shape of St. Quentin Cathedral or another towards the woody bastion of St Gobain rising between this spot and Taon. Wide, wide round this little pavilioned hill the countryside is strewn with slain orchards. That Herod's massacre of the earth's innocents is only a beginning. You pas* through Flavy-le-Martel, Jussy, other villages smashed or abolished. It is all surpassed by the horror of Chauny. Near the Oise it was a stirring industrial towii of some 12,000 inhabitants. The Boche led away many of its women and girls and able-bodied men into staveiv, packed the rest of the population into one small portion of the town, end then burned and bombed the rest, «iieet by street and house by house. Fronts of houses standing up with nothing behind, backs of houses with nothing in front hut the debris of fallen walls i>.nd ficors, sides of houses with nothing to support, sutted interiors, gaping facades, hangincr lath and plaster, vistas of totterins; brick, bristling timber, sloping rubbish. The roof of the. Town Hall °ags over two walls, and in the yawning vacancy the birds fly and twitter. Remember, <?entle pacifists, that there are soldiers fighting in the French army who haft wives, daughters, sisters in places like Chauny, and know not what is become of them. Atrain, as in the case of ever, l ' other day, I must leave out enough to fill one of these pages with things worth while. But we came to Coucy-le-Chat-eau. What was it? Dismantled long ago, it was yet amonjst all castles what our towered Durham on its rock is amongst all cathedrals. The barons built here in a tall and solid spirit, an the priests built at Laon over there, behind that near thick-forested massi which the Germans still hold. The round crenellated keep that topped the rest was a hundred feet wide. "This is the king of all towers," wrote once a proud antiquary, "others are spindKs beside it." In profile the Castle of Couey, with its donjon and avenues, look'.-d like Windsor. You will never see it. Its giant fall has thrown a mountain of stones down the hill. Above the sky shows through the vacant windows of one mighty wall. The Boche make* war on the works of ages and on the soul within us all. For what of the day after, t'engis and fantastic, in this compressed diary of the unbelievable—the day of Rheims? Thousands of soldiers, sleeping yet gjini, nacked into hundreds of motor lorries were moving through the interminable avenue of the road along the Aisne It Soissons the venerable cathedral stood rent and shaken and may fall That was an introduction. Later in the morning we walked through rising flclds of barley. On the mild crest of the ground, something distant, small, distiu't, familiar, came in view. It was Rheims. It stands out from all this lovelv rolling landscape like something auart, as though it had been framed above and had floated down like the ark. We heard the steady booming of the German guns. (To be continued).