THE REBIRTH OF THE CITIES

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 76, 22 December 1917, Page 13

THE REBIRTH OF THE CITIES

AFTEU-WAPv VISIONS. "Whea this war is over, or within the ykrs winch will most neariy loliow it, tuei'B will be soma new iiutl wonueriul towns ui tho world,'.' says the Boston'"Transcript." "Tney.will be towns, not inerciy wicks ami mortal', but towns wit it souls, towns whose very names will kindle deep emotion. Nor will these towns possets souls merely in) tho flsusa that! tney have accumulated memories and becomo the ceaitro of a thousand stories through tho passage of oldfashioned creeping centuries. The things of which we now 6poak is a newer and a different thing, it inborn of n moro strenuous and terrible experience than ever a town had before. It meaijs destruction and rebirth; it means participation. in, a tragedy of sacrifice, It means tho triumph over evil. Take Verdun, for instance. Verdun had fought before this war cams upon tho world. A fortress town, it bad withstood fiiuges. It had any amount of history. But never before had its 6tones fallep one by one, and its bricks gone in.to dust, and its streets become trenches of the dead, while it still remained invincible. Viotory in destruction—when had tho world seen that before? When, before, had a city seemed to personalise tho resistance of all good to all bad, so that abovo itß fallen walls a spirit of victory and peace seemed to arise and fill all the air—a spirit visible across the seas

"Verdun will be rebuilt, and we Americans . shall participate in its rebuilding. It will not be an old city then. It -will bo almost wholly new. But abovo its streets,, and its houses, which in their architecture Trill perhaps be very commonplace, very unpfcturesque, a souj of strength, of resolution, of memory will brood whioli will bring tears to the of every traveller who comes to it. Here was centred the supreme resistance; here the free world's hopes inspired the grimy gunners; and into every homely brick wall will to built the passion of twenty nations. "Nothing like it, outside of Bethlehem. "Of Reims, of Arras, of poor harrow-ed-up Ypres, of many a smaller city of Trance and Belgium, very nnicli the same thing will bo said. And at last thero will "bo beauty outsido of. Beauty; for when tho iron mills, the coal pockets, the sooty chimneys of Lens are reconstituted,' the soul of the etrugglo of all tlij years of the war will riso in colours of gold and of rose nn>! spread its wings of loveliness above the coal oity, and with its clouds of smoke the fragrance of a Hundred thousand unrecorded heroisms will bo distilled over the earth."