BELGIAN FRONTIER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 February 1940, Page 7

BELGIAN FRONTIER

STRONG FRENCH DEFENCES. CONCRETE & GUNS EVERYWHERE. All along the Belgian frontier, as along the others to the south, French defences are being strengthened without respite, writes a special correspondent of "The Times.” Everywhere there is the same measured progress of concrete and guns, and a tour of some ol these northern positions from. Montmedy to the coast make it abundantly clear that whatever chances the Germans had many years ago of attacking France through a swift invasion of Belgium they would be infinitely less likely to succeed now. Most of the journey took me into the illustrious battlefields of the last war, from the woods and valleys ol the Ardennes, across the scarred plains of Picardy and Flanders. A problem peculiar to French fortifications in the north arises from the fact that the Belgian frontier remains open. Every day thousands of Belgian work-people cross over to the factories and fields and return at night; often the frontier runs along the main streets of a village, and there are many difficulties in exercising an adequate control. One of the chief requirements, therefore, is concealment, and here it is remarkable how a traveller by road may go for miles without seeing more than an occasional barrier of barbed wire or a battery of an-aircraft guns squatting surprisingly in the middle of a beet field. Yet several French armies are there in position with all their mechanised power. MOUNTAIN AND PLAIN. The most impressive aspect of the French defensive system is the consummate skill with which it is made to conform with frontiers that contain every geographical feature, from the rolling downs of the Maginot Line proper to mountains and rivers, forests and plains. They have been welded into the greatest chain of fortifications in history. Broadly, its main object is so to canalise the attack behind elastic forward positions that the choice of the battlefield remains with the defending armies; every position, from fortresses to wire entanglements, is so constructed as to meet the enemy with enfilading fire. One of the most interesting sectors, because it contrasts so greatly with the others, guards the German advance along the Channel coast. It has three distinct features—the sand dunes rising from the foreshore, a broad cultivated plain bounded by a canal, so typical of the French > lowlands, and. third, a belt of wooded country that lies below sea level. The defensive positions which I was shown were masterly for their depth and ingenuity. Life in these regions seems to find its reason in beetroot and barges; the mud is what it always was. Down on the fringe of the Ardennes the heights look strong and serene; there could hardly be a way over the granite cliffs that tower along the tongue of the frontier up to Givet. and the valley of the Meuse has not been so extensively flooded for the last 20 years. Wo visited some of the batteries that command it and looked down on Sedan. It was a tour that took one among the graves o’ British. French, and German soldiers in their thousands: the bitter agony of it all was there to look upon in the desolation of the hills above Verdun torn for miles around in jagged shellholes that even now arc barely covered i by poor grass and misshapen saplings. , Field-gun turrets have been mounted I among the noble ruins of the forts, as though they were symbols of the undying faith of France. i