WESTERN FRONT TO-DAY.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 March 1921, Page 12

WESTERN FRONT TO-DAY.

BATTLEFIELDS DISAPPEARING. TOURISTS DISAPPOINTED. Most of those I meet returning from the battlefields of the Great War seem to be disappointed, writes Blasco Ibanez in an article appearing in a Canadian paper. Their first thought* on landing in Paris was the old front. “Show us the Hindenburg line, immediately!” They had read every "flay for four years about the great things done in the fighting. Their imagination had worked on the impressions thus received and magnified them. In addition it seems that pedple who come to France from great distances expect the country to exhibit something proportionate to the expense and discomfort of their travels. Anticipation outstrips realities. Ask them how they enjoyed their trips to the front and you get almost always the same answer. “Instructive and interesting, I suppose. But not so much after all.” With the result that Americans come to Paris to visit ’ the old battlefields; but they remain to spend their time at the theatres and dance halls of the capitals of Europe. The fact is, that in the two years since the end of the war, France has not been idle. I have even heard sentimental tourists protest aloud at the methodical way in which the French are erasing the horrible vestiges of war. Shell-torn ruins, cellar-holes of burned houses,’ ponds made by “Jack Johnson” and “Big Bertha,” fields ploughed by the barrages, rusting wire entanglements, criss-crossing trench lines strewn with empty shrapnel cases, abandoned guns, dismantled tanks—how romantic! What a 'desecration to clean up! Unfortunately for sentiment, and art even, France has got to live. She is not able to survive on the picturesque alone. COVERING IT UP. I may go even further. France is displaying a remarkable energy in this work of rehabilitation of the devastated regions. Tourists even of the present moment begin to feel they have come a trifle late to get an'ocular impression of the world catastrophe. Those who wait until next year will probably see only such memories of four years of heroism as patriotism has decided to preserve for posterity. This is just as true of reconstruction as it was of the war. I have just come back from a tour of the famous “Western Front.” You would be surprised at the dramatic changes two years have made in villages, in architecture, jn landscape, and even in people. Enormous automobiles, packed with sightseers, stop at a specified station; and the barker begins his explanation of the great battle: “Here the artillery opened fire, hurling one hundred and fifty thousand tons of projectiles in the space of thirty minutes, think of it, ladies and gentlemen, in! thirty minutes.” Well, you look, and jlou dig into your imagination to evoke t*he picture. ’ For all you can actually see is a field like any other field, with a. few oxen at work perhaps, of a tractor more likely getting the ground ready for the next crop. x GRAVES WILL DISAPPEAR. The barker orates on burning barns and tumbling houses. You look rm and see before you an up-to-date farm establishment, with white-walled structures and red-painted roofs. Not a sign of the old trees, cut off short by artillery fire, with gnarled, charred stubs for branches. Thfey' have been chopped down and turned into firewood. So the fences and walls, but yesterday pierced with bullet and shell, have now been rebuilt along with the roads they line. Field cemeteries are becoming fewer and fewer. The identified bodies have been disinterred by the families. Only the graves of the unknown dead, along with a few Germans, remain. You find such tombs entirely surrounded by the growing wheat. %The French farmer respect? the dead. On meeting a wooden cross he turns his plough a little to one side. That, however, is for the-present. Next year or the year following, the cross may have fallen. The cultivator will not spare tike unmarked grave. The mound will be wiped out and the memory of it, just as the sleeping hero himself will be absorbed in the earth forever.

Places may still be seen where the clash of opposing forces was so violent and so long sustained that the traces of battle will be slow in disappearing. You find landscapes that are still desolate, where months of artillery fire have cliujijied the earth crust to 4he depths of sevCTal yards, mixing loam, and rock and hard-pan as in a geological cata- , clysm. Thousands of human bodies have ! been lost in fragments in such dejerts; and the ghosts of the dead seem to haunt the dreary wastes with a sense of weirdness and horror. But the French farmer does not despair at anything. With limitless patience he has already driven his plough into the barren land which has hitherto yielded only a crop of human bones with pieces of rusty steel. He is bound that some day it shall produce again. The land is his. He inherited it from his father, or his grandfather. Or else he has bought it with hard-earned savings. He is determined to get his money back. SOME RECOLLECTIONS. / / When I visited the Western front for the second time it was just six months after the first battle of the Marne. The year was 1915. A staff officer of the sth Army acted as my guide. He was anxious to shoXv me a specimen! of villages that had really suffered from the drive on Paris. 1 remember that our automobile ran along the country raids for the better part o-f a forenoon. The officer could not find the village he had in mind. His war maps were quite useless. All the old landmarks, buildings, walls, fields, had vanished. “We must find it,” he said. “Only a mass of ruins standing; towers whittled sharp by bullets and pierced with shells like flutes. And a population of starving cats and dogs.” Finaly we came to a pretty town, with excellent houses in good condition. I a window broken here and there perIhaps, and an occasional shell-torn wall. The officer thought he would ask th© way. To our surprise, that was the very j town we had been looking for. A half- > I year had been sufficient to bring it back ;to life from its ruins! You had to look closely to find any traces of the storm that had passed —a ruin on some of the back streets, bullet holes plugged with plaster, shell holes newly filled. The fact was that the French peasants had come back again, and taken up their life as usual, though the artillery could still be heard rumbling a few miles off, like distant thunder. That was a miracle of six months of French energy. > Imagine then the results of reconstruction over two years. Unfortunately the curiosity of the , jurists who have recaaUy, been

the front sometimes takes a disquieting turn. It seems that many people, otherwise honest enough, cannot resist the temptation to steal a collection of curios.

On my recent trip, I passed through Verdun, where the war took on a specially harrowing and tragic aspect, and which for that reason is most frequented by visitors. 1 was everywhere. met by officers quite willing to speak their minds on this matter of souvenir hunting. The result of such abuses, they told me, has been that the subterranean forts which held out so desperately against the Germans, have had to be closed to the public. The early sightseers carried off everything that could be moved down; the electric light bulbs, which, is the first weeks, had to be replaced over and over again every day. It was useless to advertise the fact that the lamps had just been brought on from Paris. The curiosity hunters were bound to |have at least one authentic memento of the historic place. ,