THINGS SEEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 September 1917, Page 6

THINGS SEEN.

FROM FLANDERS TO ALSACE.

SOME VIVID PICTURES. (By J, L. Garvin in London Observer). (Continued;. On tho hill with the obelisk, where Kapoleon watched the battle <Jf 1814, we lunched. Through the trees and airy Bcreens of dried leaves we saw and heard Rheims being pounded from the sombre heights on either side. The cathedral was now much closer and 6tood clear over the wide-ranging houses. We saw the shell-bursts falling round it. Two miles away, and it seemed leas, this ivas going on under our eyes, and we could not stop it. The bombardment is sullen, obstinate, malign. It is an attempt to shake France by a sabotage of her soul. It rolls a hollow thunder. From a thousand to two thousand shells had been falling into thg city every day for the last six weeks. Another crash comes while you are being asked if you will have some galantine. Moßt tragedy is necessarily punctuated by regular meals. We have permission to go into the city. We drive rapidly through the streets. In the deserted Boulevard Gerbert our motor chooses this moment to break a tyre. It would. This happens just when a recent shell has caught a lamp-post and knocked it silly. For us, the street is quiet. It is the first of the incorrigibly diverting contrasts with which the world at its worst is crossed We must go to Pommerv's, if you please. The tower is broken, but girls are packing champagne as colly as the stout old wlnte-bearded Mayor and the Town Council transact their civic affairs in a champagne-cellar. My brave French people! We have to go down into the catacombs amongst millions of bottles and come up to pledge the Allies in an estimable vintage of 11)04. You canr.c: buy it. I do not believe tliis scene is real, but nevertheless keep the cork. Who could have expected this preliminary? Word conies that the cathedral is opened for us. Through streets knocked to pieces we pass to the Place du Parvis. We are there. More than twelve years ugo I last stood in that square—now grass-grown, shell-pitted— aiid looked up to that marvellous precipice of beauty and sculptured prayer—huge as rock, delicate as lace, all imagined and shaped. carven, fretted, with an endless grace and creativeness of joy and faith. Now the portals are barricaded wi& sandbags. But, aloft, many of the little suave statues arc limbless or headless, the niches are chipped, the rose-window has lost half the ancient glass that glowed like gems. Above and below its wheeling tracery the arcade and the exquisite light parapet show broken 6tretches. High up to the gallery of the kings and to the twin-turrets, moulding are blunted, surfaces flayed. And yet austere and immense, gracious though stricken, it is more majestic in its desolation than when I last saw it on a feastday in its old glory, and it stands the most knee-compoiiing thing on earth. The apse and the southern side are still more battered. Pinnacles, statues, little arches under the flying buttresses have fallen. There is worse within. The I great vault and roof are widely open to the sky. Around apse and choir the windows are skeletons. Glass and frasments fall an(\ fall each day. and each day are piously collected. There arc shell holes in the nave. Three shells .pitched in that morning, a few hours before our visit; there were eight the day before. Just now, as we look about, and grieve with little speaking,' the .Boehe is quiet, but even when he is quiet •he is damned.

From the road to Epernay we turned aside to Hilly. On one side of the road a little child hung on to its mother's j apron. On tlio other side we looked across leagues and leagues of vineyards flourishing. On the right a bombardment raged over grim Mont Ctfrnillet, now peeled bare against the horizon of this .fertile scene, laughing in fruitfulness and rfeaee. And on the left Rheims Cathedra;, lit by the evening sun., gleamed small, but gave its whole shape. It was the parting view.

From Epernay we went by train to Bar-le-Duc, known to the shad?s of the Great Guise and the Old Pretender. We got there at three in the morning, rested less than three hours, and started again. It was worth it. for here we are on the edge cf the heights of the Upper Meuse. and les3 than forty miles by road from Verdun. And what road. Salute it as you drive. It is the via sacra. It saved France. The route from Chalons was under fire. Through Bar along this very road to the battlefield poured on day and night the improvised flood of motor transport which conquered the German , railways. The lorries tumbled their loads and rushed back for more. The drivers worked until they dropped like stones when released. We come to a turnine, "'a Verdun 1 '; to another, "aGlorieux Verdun"—surely the proudest signpost in the world. In a few minutes we were within the Egyptian mass of Vauiiaii's old ramparts, and knew feelings akin to those of the older Crusaders When they reached Jerusalem. For here, too, let us dare reverently to say it, there has been a passion and a Calvary, and a resumption of a nation's soul

The military governor did us the distinguished honor to conduct us in person. For once a grey, showery day. Better so, tor it suited the starkness of this place, and, besides, conditions of low visibility for the Boehe enabled us to walk more ogenjy on old battle-tops than would have been possible in finer weather. By mauled and lacerated ! streets, through the grand mediaeval gateway of the Meuse. over the bridge, we come to a road that swings up the Belleville heights. We follow the ridge. We are on Souville, the key to the defence when fate came to the last pinch. Here as late in the struggle as July 12 last year tho Boches made their last desperate throw. They surged up to the very spot where we are standing beside have won here and held their footing nothing could have saved Verdun. Its higii-M't cathedral with twin towers rises pyramid-wise and crownß the city with conspicuous boldness. We cannot see it from here. But on the left of us the German guns swept down one long valley from Douaumont, and on the right of us down another long valley from Vaux. The fall of Souville wouid have been the end not, indeed, of the conflict, but of that part of it which covered Verdun itself. We see how "Petain of Verdun" was an iron economist in war, but terrible in onslaught at the right hour and not before. Nivelle, his lieutenant, mustered heavy reserves, flung them on I the Germans, and hurled them down ifrom Souville never to reach it again. I We walk on. It is like a hundred jViinys in the range and violence of chaos. Hell-storms of explosives and fury of hand-to hand battle have wrung and

racked and riven and scooped this ground. The depths of the dry fosses that were part of the standing fortifications seem to mingle with the shell craters dinging all the crest and slopes to make a more infernal convulsion of earth-troughs and earth-billows. Wc toss up and down like cockboats on this crumbling sea. What makes Verdun appalling is the extent of this upheaval and its nakedness. Unlike the Somme wilderness, not a herb gTOWs. 'Yet all these hills and ridges which rise and sink and heave away waved when the war began with forests like those that cover the crests southward. Enough that we see around us Froideterre, Thiaumont, Douaumont, and more legendary Yaitx. Tavannes—all the heights of immortal meaning where France at bay conquered at last in the battle of all her battles through the two thousand years since Caesar gave her a new destiny. AVe had dejeuner below Vauba,n's citadel, in the official tunnel hung with flags. It was like nothing so much as lunching in the Twopenny Tube without the trains. Carrying away mingled impressions that will never fade—neither the awful nor the heroic —I left with unwillingness. To leave Verdun seemed like moral loss. There, as nowhere else [ know, everyone seems in personal touch with the soul of great tilings. A few days in Paris, chiefly with young friends, who poured out their hopes for reconstrution in France, and were equally keen about my own dreams for reconstruction in British. T.i love of our two countries, we discussed everything in the world, and cross-examined our ideals without abating one jot o' them. To me for one, may it ever be given to keep ill touch with the best of the new generation, young and fresh and Bound spirits who can both act and dream. One day we went with them from charming Meaux to shattered Seijlis, along the Ourcq flank of the Marne battlefield. How critically the issue was suspended almost to the last I had never so losely realised: and trembled as though the Boehe had taken Nanteuil yesterday and set the fate of the Marrfe battle in doubt again. Many things in that battle are a mystery yet. Another day, I saw General Pershing receive the flags of honor in the court of the Inralides amidst a hollow square of Americans in khaki. The statue of Napoleon —an expert in eagles—brooded above and approved the young bird from over the Atlantic. The little advance-guard of the -fighting power of the United States stepped out through Paris. That was history visible and marching. For six months or more the Entente Cordiale must carry tho weight of this war until America's first million is ready for the grapple. The finai and. in some ways, the crowning thing was the visit to the Vosges. I had wished to get fresh touch again with the question of Alsace-Lor-raine. At first it had not seemed possible, but it was made possible. So let us go across the plateau of Langres, whence rivers of France flow every way towards all her seas: and let us travel till we come to Belfort. It is absurd to try to indicate in a few lines what happened afterwards. My guides were French officers, all of whom had left Alsace miore than twenty years ago rather than brook military service in Germany. More than any other men in the world, these Alsptisv,; imvc had to make fine steel of life. To one of them I owe an especial debt. He is an accomplished critic of English literature, an Oxonian, an author of many bqoks. For nearly three years the lines which have most cheered hil lone "'mtirtr for the day. deferred have been those of "Lead kindly light." I am afraid much of our talk was an exchange of quotations about things that were before the war and will be after it. but perhaps bcarin" on it better than we knew.

, The first evening we went from Belfort straight into the mountains. By one of the fine military roads which the French have made since their recapture of the southern neck of Alsace we reached a secluded valley where the patois was as German as ihe gables, but temperament and happy manners were French. There was a fine lake reservoir made by the enemy, but captured from them, despite a solemn inscription in the name of the Prince Hohenlohe, who afterwards became Chancellor, We stayed at another village where tiie descendant of a French statesman, famous in the days of our grandfathers, is carrving on the whole various administration of a distinctive little domain. More dlinners with generals and Oommandants; more fraternal toasting of all the Allies and of American intervention' The fullest and strangest of all the days on the two rronts was when wc went up a double-headed mountain which bastions the plain of the ißhine. The French hold the slightly higher summit the Boches the sligtly lower. The whole top has been soa'ked in heroic blood. The war has known no more deadly fighting-pitch than this mountain which lifts above the hanging forests a rocky brow covered with thousands of thick, short, bleached tree-stumps like dying gate-posts. The shelling was warm 'that miorning. The crashes were coming steadily nearer. ''The next will fall just about where we are standing," said Cap--1 tain X. May I remind you that it did. But we were first snugly ensconced in a dug-out, while as I hint•ed, seemed to pop up out of a rat-hole and presented itself in tin tumblers. After about forty minutes the ißoche began to think 'about his lunch and slacked. 'We went then through com-munication-trenches like sunk pergolas, sun-dappled, with vegetation twining round the open rafters above, and so came to a certain place where wc wriggled crouching through low-browed passages and peeped through slits and chinks in the rick-fact, and skipped up observation ladders for a snap-view over the sharp edge of things. The Boehe below was as near as your top-window is to your neighbor's doorstep across the street, but he was well earthed and ambushed.

At Tliann, down the valley, the swing of social life wa3 inimitably French. Yet in the ruined part there is a dead church where the figure of Christ on the roof is decapitated by a shell. It compares in symbolic power with the Virgin of Albert, though a dreadful contrast On another hill that same afternoon we lay deep in the grass with our Alsatian officers. and each of our friends looked over the German lines towards the place where he was born, and each told his tale. Twenty years ago they gave up home, with all its ties ; in one typical ease wealth as well, and now they are waiting for the deliverance that must come, as they have waited here for three long years with the controlled intensity of passion which marks considerable men. Next morning we went to a little ,-ehool where the village boys and girls are 'rapidly learning French. At another hamlet the seventy-fives were hammering the Boches entrenched some two thousand yards away. There a regimental band played the ' Star-spangled Banner," and then, did more than play "Tipperary"—a French trooper with a ringing voice sang the English words

with an accent that was an "eutento cordiale" in itself. All standing at salute, wo closed on the "Marseillaise,'' shook hands, and parted. When I think of Alsace now, I shall think of green ■valleys forested to the top, of song and merriment and agonies concealed, and of still, blue upper mountains that overlook all else in the evening like the spirits of the land. The reeonquerd corner is a pledge for the redemption of the rest. From the North Sea coast to the Swiss border it is going to be a long fight. It must be a fight at any cost until France, at. long last, sees the sunrise of her newday breaking eastward from the Rhine.