"ENDLESS MILES OF RUINS."

Taranaki Daily News, 28 February 1919, Page 7

"ENDLESS MILES OF RUINS."

A VISIT TO LIBERATED FRANCE, Mr D. H. Illingworth, Director-General of the British Committee of the Red Cross, after a tour of inspection in French territory lately released from the enemy's grip, writes as follows: The Allied thrust has brought to view tho grim reality of the Germans unrestrained barbarity. Starting from Rheims, now a shapefcss mass of ruins, the great cathedral, a thousandfold more impressive as alone it stands defying human power to destroy; through the plain, remembered resplendent in waving corn, now indescribably desolate, the fertile soil hidden by the upturned chalk and covered with coanjtless miles of barbed wire, rusted and tangled; past the shattered Fort of Brimont, which resisted the heroic assaults of succeeding years, to fall at last, outflanked, in the sweeping advance; through the charred remains cf familiar villages; passing with increasing difficulty the mine craters at cross roads and shattered bridges, we approached the receding front. From Vouziers right, along the line, past Berry-au-Bac and the Cremin-dcs-Dttnres recrion to Soissons, past the St. Gota.in Massif, Laffaux Mill, and scores of other places with names of t.rag;e and triumphant memory: everywhere through utter destruction of buildings, trees and the land itself, we came to Laon, standing almost alone, an oasis in the desert with its cathedral and houses intact, and its people beaming with joy in their deliverance a week before And so it must be from the sea to the Alps—France lacerated to the bone. I

Jf there are endless miles of ruins there are thousands of beaming faces, i Wounded filtering hack from the front. | waiting their turn, old men ;*m? | women and their grandchildren huddled jv/ith the remains of their possessions, cm a croaking cart; drawn by a lame old horse, returning perhaps to heaps of ruins which they may still fondly claim as home—one and all bear the stamp o p trials bravely borne and of the light of final triumph near at hand. It might have 'been difficult for Englishmen to witness these signs of Prance's agony, which the freedom from invasion hao spared us, had not Britain's sympathy and help from the first days of war been unstinted. Of all the parts played by our Empire in the great war, surely no men and women wiil in years to come look back on theirs with greater satisfaction and perhaps wonderment th<m those who have toiled alongside the French on Ited Cross and civilian work. The tusk, with the double barrier of language and our national shyness to be surmounted, ha<t cost a great e(To;t, exhausting perhaps, but not lost; for Iho French are quick to respond to sympathy. Burin? the dark years when Rntaiivs share seemed hut a mirage in I lie desert of sufferings through whi"h the French were toiling, a last'n«r link of understanding was forged between the nations by these Good Sawilwiß and those at home whose aynerosity has supported them.

T f great things have been accomplished much remains to he done. Reconstruction of homes, churches an<" tones mnv be hf-vond the realms »•.. untarv aid: but the millions of peor.e rsturuina to their hom«a «aa be lieto-