SILENT BATTLEFIELDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1919, Page 11

SILENT BATTLEFIELDS.

, THE OLD FRONT-LINE. .. PASSOHENDAELE TO-DAT. RIDGE OF DESOLATION. London, Sept. 21. Mr. Keith Murdoch, writing to the Australian press, gives the following description of the battlefields of France and Belgium as they appear to.day:— Not even a soldier can imagine the profoundness of the desolation brooding over the old battlefields to-day. The old spirit, the action, the energy and lusty strength of the youthful armies no longer temper the scenes of waste and destruction. All is emptiness, weediness, barrenness. Men's strife seems to have rolled far away, and to have left hers a vacuous and untenanted wilderness, already almost forgotten. From Ypres to St. Quentin I travelled through a monotonous, weedy desolation, with the ghosts of cities and villages arising here and there like dumb sentinels of the dead. At places this waste is 20 miles broad, and all along its fringes are far wider zones of semishattered places where the peasants are striving again to raise corn. Amidst the shellholes and smashed redoubts the weeds grow in the middje zone thighhigh. The rankest growths hide those old trenches and landmarks which the artillery had not already made unrecognisable amidst the tumbled earth. The War Office has 200,000 Germans and 85,000 Chinese under British officers clearing up the fields, collecting the rusty iron, the reddened barbed-wire, the old shells and rails. These men dynamite the German redoubts for steel girders. AH our Passchentkele redoubts have gone this way, and bow lie, jagged lumps of concrete, but the redoubts along the Menin road remain as memorials.

AMONG THE RUINS OF/MESSINES.

Messines is blown to fragments, in which the old villagers dig for hidden treasures, and the "chink, chink!" of the demolition parties' tools resound across the wide valleys where we fought. Two garish shanty estaminets have been erected at the Messines cross-roads. These tin and timber estaminets spring up in many parts of the Belgian battlefields. You csn drink Belgian beer or bad wine at the Zonnebeke cross roads or Broodseinde on sites truly red with Australian blood. The shanty hotels crowd each other ait Ypres, near the Menin Gate through which the stream of trippers passes, but on the French fields it is different. No soul stirs amidst the rubble of proud old Bailleul. There is life in Meteren again, but the dozen pioneers' dwellings there bear such signs as "Coiffeur" and "Ironmonger," not "Beer."

The general rule along the front is where ground was not heavily shelled agriculture is beginning again. Elsewhere there is no sign, indeed, no hope of production yet, for ( every yard will have to be laboriously treated. The saddest scene of utter decay is that of the • Passchendaele fields, where a few prisoner companies and a few Tommy gravediggers are the only people visible in the wilderness- Australian souvenirs can still be found—tattered uniforms in the Daisy and Dairy Woods. There are little crosses marking the graves. The nearest Australian grave to Passchendaele is that of Private A. E. Toll, of the 20th Battalion. I searched for signs of those brave men of the Ninth Brigade who got to the outlying houses of the village itself on that dreadful morning of October, but their fate will ever remain a mystery. The Fifth Division's memorial on Polygon Butte has a lonely and magnificent domination over the whole of the Ypres sepulchre. The other divisional memorials are JeBS advanced. Each is awaiting material for the obelisk. Not enough Australian bodies have been recovered at VillersBrettoneux, and in the Chuignes district for the cemetery at the foot of the Coups Memorial. This cemetery, there, fore, has been filled up with other dead, representing all parts of the Empire. This graveyard work will last for five years at the present rate. The percentage of bodies recovered is proving small, but some day there will be many peaceful cemeteries' with lines of headstones surrounding the central tablet, "Their name liveth for evermore."

OLD TRENCHES OF FLEURBAIX. The sights most impressive to an Australian along the front are the burst black sandbags and trenches of Fleurbaix, our first, and perhaps most disastrous fighting ground in France, and the neglected Bullecourt field, where the great Australian Army is represented only by a few discolored crosses, and even the saps of the, trenches are lost in the general obliteration, decay and weediness-

Traffic has been resumed on the Bel-lenglise-St. Quentin Canal, and further north one can see our Decauville railways used for civilian purposes, with grandmothers under black umbrellas sitting in the trucks which not long ago carried our helmeted soldiers.

The anniversary of the entry of Australia's five divisions in the finest fettle into the costly offensive of Passchendaele finds the ridge one of the bleakest and most deserted places in the world. It is scarcely believable that 100,000 Australians, as the spearhead for many, hundreds of thousands of British, so short a time ago, stormed over this empty ground against a picked German corps, the outer shield of at least 500,000 men concentrated behind the enemy linos.

There is so little left, and so few graves. Even, for instance, the artillery harracks at Ypres, which seemed a perfect haven of rest for troops from the muddy struggle In the front line, would not now be regarded aa fit shelter for poultry. They are utterly deserted, noisome, and roofless. Divisional headquarters in dug-outs under the ramparts are falling to bits, and are given over to rats. Entering General Walker's first divisional headquarters, where, two years ago, an Australian staff was working day and night under the glare of electricity, one stumbled knee-deep in poois of water. The old camping grounds round Wiltje and Zonnehckn Lake are now barren fields of tumbled earth. Westhoek Ridge, from which the offensive was launched, is wholly overgrown. Bits of our jumping off tape can still be discovered, but the shelters dug during those anxious hours of German bombardment, before the dawn, are lost in the general maze. Standing on Passchendaele, one realises to a great exitent the importance of the territory won by the Australians, for we carried our lines to the edge of the final ridge, but you can walk time and again over this hard-won ground, and see nothing living, and nothing Australian, except a few tatters of khaki, a few i broke rifles, discolored crosses, and the '£ne memorial at Polygon Wood,