THE HUN IN FRANCE.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16362, 6 November 1918, Page 7

THE HUN IN FRANCE.

TERRIBLE EXPERIENCES OF THE VILLAGERS. & CHRISTCHURCH ARTILLERYMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. A member of "The Press" literary staff, who is on active service with the New Zealand Field Artillery, writing from the Western front under date of August 14th, gives the following graphic pen picture of the life of the French villagers in the battlo zone: When tho Hun overran thi6 part of France last March, much of the ground he gained was gree:i with young crops which had been sown by old men and women and boys and girls —all the able, bodied men were away, and had been away for three or four years, fighting tho ravagor of this glorious country. Tho Hun, ,rho usually destroys all that is of no use to him, has carefully tended those crops during tho last f° u £ months, but, thanks to our latest push on tho Somme, he has had to leave thom ripe, but unharvested. When we trekked to this part of the front last March we passed for miles along roads crowded with refugees; the villages and towns were full of them. I nover want to see sights like those again. Men, hardened by the sights of three and four years of war, declarod that tne crowds of refugees—old men and women, and mothers with young childrcn —who had been forced # to leave their homos of a lifetime with a few pitiful odds and ends of clothing and household goods, affected them more than anything they had seen. In spite of their terrible misfortunes and sufforing. one never heard a complaint from these poor people. Shortly after wo arrived in_ this part of _ the country I had occasion to travel in a train, and I got into conversation with a poor widow, whose three little chil~ dren wore sleeping in utter exhaustion on the seats of the next compartment. She had to be forced to leave a certain town which was being heavily shelled and bombed by the Hun. Her own home had been utterly destroyed by a bomb, and she herself wounded in the loot by a splinter. 1 expressed my sympathy in my best French, and sho thanked me with a smile, and the remark "Cost la guerre, Monsieur." 1 have never heard any grumbling or oomplaining from these poor people; always they dismiss the recital of their troubles with that remark "C'est la guorre," and they look forward with nope and confidence to the day when their land will be freed from the invader. * ~ . . ~ i rn many of tho villages on the fringe of tho firing-line, and well within the zone of artillery fire, many of the poople refused to leave their homes. They were old people and young wives and widows with young families. Day and night German shells crashed in tho walls and roefs of houses or burst in the roadways or gardens, but these people wont abo Jt _ their daily work with comparative indifference. There were cows to tend, fields to be ploughed, crops to be sown, and from daylight till dark these people went about thoir heavy tasks, for the sea-sons would not wait. And when the title of the tierman advance had been stemmed, those people submitted with the same spirit to the billeting of innumerable soldiers in their houses and barns. For four years now the populations of the myriad villages of this part of the country have been swelled to abnormal proportions by the billeting of thousands of soldiers on the inhabitants, who have borne the inconvenience and lack of privacy with stoical indifference. Their best rooms have been allotted to officers' billets and messes, or to headquarters and_ orderly rooms: c'e6t la guerre. Their fields and orchards and) woods have been cut up by horse and transport lines and waggon parks, by camps and dumps aad gun-pits. Villages and woods in this part or the country are always liable to the attentions rif the Hun gunners, who know that they are centres of traffic and military activity, and the trees and orchards in which tnese villages are hidden afford good cover for heavy artillery positions ; hence one almost invariably finds numerous batteries of "heavies, " 6in, Bin. and 9.2 in howitzors, in action in gardens, orchards, and adjacent fields. But tne thundering of the great guns and the counter-fire of the Hun seldom, if ever, disturb the even tenor of the life of the villagers, whose children I have seen romping over piles of high-ex-plosive shells. One day I was watching a section of 9.2 howitzers firing at some target miles behind the Hun lines. With blinding Sashes and a simultaneous roar from the three guns, a salvo of throe huee shells started on their flight. A little French boy with a hoe on his shoulder, who was evidently on his way to work in the fields', and who caught my eye, remarked with a grin: "Beaucoup bombard, monsieur! No bon for Boche, eh?" I have seen women andl girls working in the 'fields almost under the muzzles of a. battery of 6in howitzers, whose shells wont whistling over their heads every few minutos. I have seen an old man ploughing a field in which tho limit of his furrows was marked by a pair of 60-pounder guns actively engaged in strafing tho Hun. Neitner he nor his horses were in the least disturbed by the firing, and when Fritz started to send over a rapid succession of 5.9 in shells, he quietly unhitched his team from the plough and! retired a short distance to a flank, and watched the great black bursts sooop big holes in the ground, while steel splinters "whinged" past his ears. As soon as Fritz stopped he went on with his work again. Next morning a field of young wheat adjoining his freshlyploughed patch was deeply pitted with half a dozen gaping sholl-noles —grim evidence of an over-night strafe. All through the summer these poor, patient people have toiled from sunrise till long after sunset every day in the fields, undeterred by the eddies and currents of war, and undismayed by the threats of Boche attacks, and now they' are reaping their reward in bumper har- : vests of wheat and oats and ryo and potatoes. Tho whole countryside for miles behind the firing-line resembles nothing so much as a vast patchwork quilt of varying shades of gold audi brown and yellow and green. The magnificent woods, now in their full glory, and the dozens of little villages with their church towers and steeples and red roofs showing through the trees and orchards in which their houses are hidden, rise liko islands above the sea of crops spread in rich waves acrrss ridges and pleasant little valleys. Fences are practically unknown here, and the intensive cultivation is a revelation to New Zealanders. Not a patch of ground is wasted save by tho war. It is a beautiful country, and on a clear summer day, when the sun i« shining with great heat from a cloudless bluo sky, with only humming aeroplanes and a long line" of observation balloons overhead, the scene from the top of a ridge I is one of entrancing beauty.