SCARS OF WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 December 1919, Page 10

SCARS OF WAR.

PROBLEM FACING FRANCE. (By Philip Gibbs, in San Francisco Chronicle.) Amiens, Sept. IS. There are astonishing changes in the life of Amiens besides that greatest change of all, which is the disappearance of the British army from its streets. In the garden of the Hotel du Rhin, which is restored to elegance we never knew, there is an orchestra playing fox trot and one-step music, and in the long room looking on to the garden a few young officers who came out after the armistice and are now ou the way back from the Rhine are drinking with ladies who have come part of the way to meet them, or for pleasure tours over the battlefields.

I listen to the music, watch these people under the trees' (it is pretty where the little electric lights sparkle among the leaves) with mild sense of resentment. This garden is full of ghosts, gallant ghosts of the men who fought through the war, endured its agonies, fell, so many of them, higher up the road. This fox trotting, these tourists, these danoing officers, do not belong to the spirit of those other days. It is foolish to think like that. It is good that music should be played again to dancing youth. The renaissance of Amiens, in spite of many unhealed wounds, is a sign that the people are beginning to rebuild their lives out of the ruin that is around them. I saw these people as fugitives. It is splendid to see so many of them home again. They have patched up the fronts of their houses, mended the shell holes in the roof, and put in their window panes. The Hotel du Commerce, which was wrecked, is almost rebuilt. The Hotel Belfort, opposite the station, looked as good as now, without a trace of the oldsears. Not yet have the worst been replaced, however. Labor is scarce in France, and there are still many hundreds of houses to Amiens which are just piles of brick cleared away from their I foundations by German prisoners. |

This neatness of ruin is admirable in its way, but not of comfort to the homeless, asking with increasing gloom when the nation is going to reconstruct, instead of talking largely about reconstruction. That question is becoming loud and ominous in France, if one may judge by its popular local newspapers. "We are tired of fine phrases," they say. "When are our devastated regions to be restored 1"

I met old friends in Amiens who talk like that. There was. a moon over Amiens last night, as on that worst night of its history, and once again I wandered around the Cathedral, and was touched by its magic beauty, in which its arches and sculptured tracery glittered like silver out of the deep Bhadow. "Sir," said the sacristan, "it was a miracle of God that saved the glory of Amiens." The sense of the miraculous was strong in the hearts of many French peasants to-day amidst the ruins of Albert, where I saw an act of faith in the renaissance of France after the death blow of war in the scene where there was little but faith to encourage the people. All British soldiers and Americans who were with tliem in the last phase will remember Albert because of that church from which the golden Madonna hung, head downward, with her baoe outstretched until after March of last year. The statue fell under an avalanche of red bricks and rosy dust.

Scores of times during the war I saw Albert under fire, and passed through it on the way to the Somme battlefields, and I saw it when our guns finished the ruin which the Germans had not quite completed, until all was smashed to fragments and not one house was standing.

Now amidst that wild chaos of destruction some people of Albert—a few hundreds—have come back and built up little wooden houses called Villa d'Esperance and Cafe de la Victoire and other optimistic names, where they proyide light refreshments for tourists frbm Paris. Yellow men from China, German prisoners and British labor companies are living still in the desert beyond where they are clearing fields of dead men and live shells. Like Amiens, the town of Albert began its new life, at least so far as having a few inhabitants again, but to thpse peasant folk tne outward symbol of the renaissance is the new church of their own faith which has been built for them temporarily near the old church by the American Red Cross. It is a wooden hut large enough to hold 2000 people or more, and to this little shrine was brought this morning an old statue of the Madonna and child, which stood for more than six centuries in Albert,' until the Australians removed it to a place of safety in time of peril. In honour of its return, the Archbishop of Amiens came to Albert, and after hifh mass in the wooden church, spoke to the people who gathered there as pilgrims to their old town.

Through the open windows as he spoke, one could see the wreckage of their homes, and the words hd spoke were inspired by that scene. Wearing his golden mitre and crimson robes—a tall, richlycolored figure, as though he stepped out of a mediaeval painting-he was stirred with the same emotion that moved those peasaut women in their black weeds and those sturdy men of Picardy when he told of the new hope that lay'in the future now that-"the damned days," as he called them, had passed with their horrors, the slaughter of. men and their degradation of humanity.