RUSSIAN LANDSCAPE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1942, Page 4

RUSSIAN LANDSCAPE

UNIFORM AND MONOTONOUS.

“I have seen a good deal of the country over which the central mass of the German invasion advanced,’ said Mr H. N. Brailsford in an address on Russia. “It is all the same. Nowhere on this earth is there a land so uniform and monotonous. The only surprising, and original things in this landscape are the Russians who inhabit it. The whole of North Europe from the mouth of the Rhine to the Volga and beyond it is a vast flat plain. When you see it from the air the only features that catch the eye are the gleaming rivers that thread their parallel courses between sandy moors and forests of pine on their way to the North Sea and the Baltic. I have seen it also from trains and mo-tor-cars and sledges. I remember once falling asleep in the train. When I wakened an hour or two later and looked out, I thought that the train must have stood still in the last of the little stations I remembered. There was the same untidy village built of log-huts; the same snow, violet in the sunlight, lay on the flat fields; the same forest stretched into the endless distance, and on the same slightly rising slope —you couldn’t call it a hill —the same peasant was driving the same sledge with the same shaggy pony to the same little monastery. But no; the name on the station building was different, and when I looked at the map I realised that the train had travelled 60 miles or so while I slept.”