PICTURES OF WAR

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 4, 6 January 1916, Page 7

PICTURES OF WAR

SCENES OF DESOLATION

SCARRED BATTLEFIELDS

WITH THE FRENCH ARMY.

At' the invitation of the French Headquarters Staff, I have spent a few days with their armies in Artois, and have been in the midst of those great battle fields round Arras and Souchez and Notre Dame de Lorette, where French soldiers have been fighting for a year of frightful, incessant struggle, and have seen again those soldiers of France whose qualities of courage and self-sacrifice, of gaiety and patience in tragedy, stir me always like some great song of life (writes Philip Gibbs in the London Telegraph). I was glad to get'back among them for a while.

And yet—Heaven knows—there was no fun in this visit to the fighting lines of our Allies. If it were not that the continuation of this war has dulled all emotion at the sight of desolation and death, which are now ordinary familiar things, a man ' might have wept tears of blood in. the midst of these battlefields where the -relics of old actions— more than a year old—are heaped up with the wreckage of to-day and yesterday, where men bleeding from fresh wounds passed me in streets of ruin, destroyed twelve months ago, and where French towns, as charming once as little fairy-tale towns of Arcady, have been smashed and pounded and ground to dust alternately by French and German guns, and were being shelled again when I went into them.

All the ground here over which I passed, and over which my eyes wandered in sweeping views of spurs and valleys, and long flat fields fringed by giant stumps of shell-broken trees, is one great battle zone in which every name of a ridge, or a hamlet, or an isolated house, ia famous in- French bulletins; recording desperate fighting there, month after month. Notre Dame de Lorette, Ablam St. Nazaire, Souchez, Carency, the' farm of La Folia, the Labyrinth, Neuville St. Yaast, Mont St. Eloi, the Chateau fiouge, the Heights of Vincy— they are written on the hearts of the French people whose sons have poured out their Wood there in waves, and who have gained victory at a fearful price. AMIDST BURSTING SHELLS. They are in French hands now, but they have not the silence of old battlefields from which the tide of war has ebbed away. Great shells were still bursting over them yesterday and the day before, as they are bursting to-day, and tho air was filled with the rush and scream of shells a3 we went from one place to another expecting to find death there., and surprised. because it came so close (within a few inches yesterday), butrnot quite close enough. Fortunately, they were mostly French guns which made an informal tumult in the air when I went some days ago to Notre Dame de Lorette. The enemy was attempting an attack upon a section of trenches down below this high ridge, and the French gunners had been asked to fire a "tii1 de barrage," ov a screen of shells, to protect their infantry. I had tramped through to Bois de Bouvigny, where the fallen leaves of autumn were being churned up with the soft mud into which one's feet plunged ankle-deep by French soldiers. v whose blue uniforms and steel helmets—they look like Roundheads in those new casques—were covered with white clay as though they had been buried alive. Two German shells came hurtling through the trees a few yards away., arriving with that warning whistle which is the most awful note in the music of war, but did no damage. It was when we were climbing up from the valley to the crest of Notre Dame de Lorette that the tempest of war began from the French batteries.

They were heavy guns—from the "eentvingt" upwards —and they fired for hail" an hour with extraordinary rapidity, the shells following each other every second across the crest of the .hill They passed above our heads—not very far above, it seemed—and so close to the ridge that they seemed to be cutting the grass. The noise of each travelling shell was prodigious. It came with a long rushing drive, which deepened into n. thrilling organ-note of tremendous volume a,=< it passed the crest in an overwhelming wave of reverberation. "Beautiful !" said one of my friends. I thought it the most awful noise, with devilish terror in it, and it was to this music of death that we wandered over the battlefield of Notre Dame de Lorette Pious pilgrims used to come to this place to worship at the shrine of Our Lady of Compassion. The chapel where they prayed is now a heap of st-onea, and all around there is a dreadful picture of war —of a year's incessant warfare FIGHT FOR A WOOD In September of the first year of war the Germans were in Bouvigny Woodj where I saw their old trenches and dugouts. In October of last year the French ch&sed them out of the wood, fighting from glado to glade, and forced them to take up a new line on the ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette It was a formidable position, from which their guns dominated the valleys below It was a position which the French determined to capture at all cost, and for months they made assault after assault, sustaining frightful casualties, so that ■the blood of the young manhood of France washed its elopes. But on 9th Mar of .this year the French stormed their way on to the heights under the cover of a hurricane of shells, and then, by hand-to-hand fighting of. a, most bloody nature, flung the enemy off the crest, and drove him into the valley to the line of Ablain St. Nazaire and Souchez. In spite of furious counterattacks they never gained that high ridge again, but left it and its slopes as a tumbled graveyard of their dead I have seen many battlefields in this war, from Dixmudc to the Argonne, but never any one more awful in its grim suggestiveness of war at its worst The very earth, with its white blotches of clay, with its German trenches flung about into holes and heaps by French shells, pockmarked with innumerable shell craters, had agonised in this yearlong battle, and is now "dead ground" in very truth. Everywhere one's footsteps stumble over fra.gments of shell and broken weapons. One has to go warily to avoid live shells, stuck out of the oai'th like bottles in a. rubbish heap "Worse things than that lie about— fragment? of human bodies, half-buried corpses, the poor tragio relics of muti. lated men. They lio in water-pools clutching the mud, and one.turns coldly away from bundles of rags and bones protruding from broken eand-bags and .crumbled..xsaraß.ets. A logg.rqw

man dug-outs had been burnt-oat of-the hillside by a concentrated storm of i French explosives. | LOOT-FURNISHED SHELTEBS. The German soldiers had lived witK i some comfort in these holes, and had furnished them with loot from French towns. Now the whole nest of shelters was a litter of earth and beams and twisted iron, from which stuck oat bits of velvet-covered chairs, chaned pieces of lace, broken mirrefs and bedsteads, i and hanks of human bones. It was the j work of 1100 French guns, and of 300,----000 French shells which were flung ovec this countryside before the great infantry attack in May, and of German guns which have battered Notre Dame de Lorette ever since those days of French victory and sacrifice. Crouching low over the crest of that hill of death, we looked over the panorama of battle, where great shells were bursting. Immediately below was Souchez, through which the French swept on 25th September, while we were assaulting Loos, and we stared into the shapeless ruins of that town, for whose '- possession our Allies paid a frightful price in blood, and fought with the recklessness of death. The results of las* month's, victory were .clear. The German lines had been pushed back beyond Souchez, beyond Ablain ,St. Nazafre, Carency, La Targette, and .NeuviTle St. Vaast—so that Lens is no longer defended on its western side by ■ ihoso series of fortified places which seenrod an impregnable barrier. Looking.southward from my liuddle of earth on the summit of Notre Dame de Lorette, beneath the flight of shells, I saw the ■ high broken towers of Mont St. Eloi, blurred by the mist and rain over all ■• -- - the countryside, and then, eastwards, the heights of Vimy, under the gEnt and smoke of shrapnel With some French officers who knew, every foot of the ground and the'detail* ed history of all the desperate fighting that scars it, we climbed down the *' ridges to the village of Ablain St, Na- : zaire, which, in spite of its rain, is still heavily shelled every day by the enemy who were thrust from it. It was not so complete a ruin as *'■ town I saw afterwards. It reminded me rather of Vermelles. That is to say, some of its. walls aro still left standing, shell-pierced, but erect, and even a house or two is left almost whole, so that one can get into its rooms and see inscriptions on the walls scrawled by German soldiers, and now, ' by French. But' it is a ghastly place, obscene in its wreckage and hideous proof; of strife, broken carts, perambulators, furniture, mixed up with broken bricks^ twisted iron, chimney pots, fireplaces, a little of rags, boots, helmets, and) bones. GERMAN PREPARATIONS. Everywhere below ground were relics of German occupation. , They had bar rowed deep and built strongly down below We went into the officers' " Casino," panelled with walnut wood, fitted up with all the skill of carpentry A piano—by Klein, of Paris—was at the end of the room, and I played a chord or two on notes once touched to German, music by the plump hands of some young1 officer forgetting the horrors of war in old love-songs once heard in the' gardens of Dresden or Dusseldorf. I wondered if one of those hands I saw in a dirty puddle of mud belonged to this musician.' There is a nest of dug-outs in Ablain, which had been used by the German Kommandatur, with a telephone installation,- and offices. Its roof is timbered and cemented so that it would stand a direct hit from any but the largest shell, and one good idea in it was a thin panel through which the officers could break a way into a communication trench should the other exit be blocked by a landslide.

Beneath most of the ruins of Ablain' there are wonderful -dug-outs upon which I kept a careful eye for immediate personal use should their late owners send any aerial torpedoes or "mineriwerfer" nearer than they were bursting at the time. Out in the streets of ruin one had a sense of utter desolation, haunted by imminent death " Here," said one of the French officers, with a fine ironic smile, "is Hie Town Hall of Attain St. Nazaire." I stood and looked at a square' space scooped out by shellcraters. It was all that was left of the chief building in the town. As we walked out of Ablain St Nazaire, glad to go because the German guns were getting active, and German rifles were sniping between the broken walls, .the wreckage about us told the tale of those days when the French soldiers came above the heights of Notre Dame and forged their way through this burning village, which resounded to the roar of shqlls and the rattle of machinegun, fire, and the yells and screams of men. It Was not difficult to see these things again in the mind's eye. If my imagination needed any help it was given by some men with bloody bandages, who came limping down the roadway, and by the> stark figure of a French soldier wheeled on a stretcher from'the trenches, and by the French troops ir> another town upon whose clothes and faces there was the clay of these battlefields, and m whoso eyes there glowed the fire of those men who fought and died to get this ground—the flame which burns in the soul of France.