INTO THE WAR ZONE

Evening Post, Volume XCIV, Issue 59, 7 September 1917, Page 7

INTO THE WAR ZONE

THE EVACUATED LAND

ARRAS AND BAPAUME

(raOM ODB OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

LONDON, June.

After seeing such places as Souchez and Givenchy one feels himself at Arras in a whole and undamaged town on a quiet holiday. . •

What is loft of Arras Cathedral is still very beautiful. Perhaps the ruin is more beautiful than, the original of the Bishop's Palace, the courtyard and the seminary. The" cloister round the courtyard still remains, and the flowers struggle for mastery against the nettles and docks which seem to put the imprint of desolation upon everything in the wake of war. Piles of masonry lie everywhere, but the scene in the whole of this precinct is nevertheless very beautiful. Looking up out of it all at the brilliant blue of more than 100 degrees of sunshine, we see the opaque yellow wings of British 'planes flying to the Hun lines and back, round and round in .wide circles, on the routine work of observing for our artillery. A Taube has come across at a great height and ia threatening two of our planes at registration work. They take no notice at all, but the Archies behind our front open vigorously and drive him off. Then the day settles down again to the hum of great heat, the drone of shells some distance off, and the- rumble of wheels on paved streets.

In the ambulatory of the Cathedral amongst the inscriptions of numerous knights from a world of warriors one is amused at the scriptural threat recorded' by a gunner of the Royal Gamson Artillery, " Vengeance is mine, sadth the Lord, I will repay." The stations of the Cross are still marked on the walls, which are fairly intact ac to the lower part. The soldiers of the British Empire have shown the building a. marked respect, which the French will undoubtedly appreciate. Rather a quaint method of noHng their visit is visible at one of the main altars. ■ Here are carefully heaped up some hundred's of tiles from different parts of the. edifice, each bearing the signature of one or more soldiers from England and overseas.

Two great statres of saints, each about 12ft high, stand almost undamaged on their pedestals, and on the walls above are acknowledgments of blessings from St. Jeanne d'Arc, dated June and July, 1909. In the Lady Chapel, though a shell or two has come through the wall, there is very little damage. The coloured statues of Notre Dame de Lourdes and St. Antony are merely flicked with splinters, and some evidently valuable work is carefully protected by sandbags. From the main steps of the Cathedral you can look through the gaping walls into the apartments of prosperous bourgeois residences, and see the nettles of devastation growing luxuriously on the third floor.

A WHIFF OF MANOEUVRES.

Passing out of Airas eastward, one might quite well be at once in the African veldt at the time of the Boer War. It is a field campaign forthwith, with: its incessant mule and horse lines, its parks of service and artillery wagons; its tents; its ditches and telephone lines and little engineering jobs. The destruction is complete, for the French, trenches for the defence of Arras were right up against the town. Every tree has been razed to the ground, every hedge obliterated, every wa,ll demolished. Nortk, east, and south it is like some great manoeuvring ground littered with the debris and the sandwich papers of the Easter camps. You might wonder where the front was but for the occasional boom of the guns and for the unfailing trend of the aii" lines of the British engineer.

Things are bad enough here, but the damage is plainly the devastation of fighting. A mile or two further south you strike something entirely new. Here trees and orchards have been deliberately cut down, roads have bean blown up, villages destroyed from below. The long, lank pollards which lined the roads have been cut off close to the ground. We are in perfectly open country. "This is BoyeUes A'illage," says a, finger-post of the R.E., not by way of a joke, but as distinct and necessary information to assist the reading of maps.

At Ervillers we found a few trees to have lunch under, and with my glasses I discovered a village undamaged amidst so much destruction. Why it was left nobody seems to know. Plere, too, we met our first Australians, cycling nonchalantly about a piece of country which is as much their own as Ballarat—Lagnicourt, Bullecourt, .Vaux, etc.

A DECENT SORT OF HUN.

Just outside Bapaume, birds have their peaceful homes in the lyehgate of tho town cemetery, left intact because the Hun has consecrated a part of his own dead and erected in it a severely Hunnish memorial. There must have beeri a decent-minded German, somewhere here about, for they have done the thing as inoffensively as one could wish.

Shells have since burst in the graveyard, splintering the stone memorial, and shattering one or two of the gableshaped wooden headstones marking the many soldier graves of the last two years. Each bears the record of ten to twenty dead—German, French, and. English together. Already the French graves authorities have been _ round, marking and noting with their tin' discs of red, white, and. blue, the resting places of the Allies. How did Pte. Warnock, of the Irish Fusiliers, come to Bapaume in August, 1915, or Pte. F. Porter, of the Rifle Brigade, in November? Why did the Germans use the word 'Inconnu' instead of 'Unbekamnt' ? There must have been a decent German in Bapaume. Or was he a prophet, seeing Gei-many's retreat ahead?

THE RUINS OF BAPAUME.

Bapaume is a monument to the infinitely greater destruction which can be done by deliberate blowing up than by long and careful artillery duels. It was scarcely under legitimate shellfire at all, but the ruin is more than equal to that of-Arras. Bapaume has evidently been one of the prettiest' places in this part of Francs. The Town Gardens on the hillside are close in to the church and the schools, and the remains of very pretty tree-lined streets give an impression of great beauty before the Hun blew his mines^ All through tho streets one sees other evidence of Prussian thoroughness. Each shopfront is placarded "Keller fur 3D man," and so on, as a guide to the cellar accommodation in case of bombardment.

Ba.paume Church is almost in the same condition ;ig tho Cathedra! of Ypres was in 1915. As wo climbed .the ruins, the strains of a band in the distance were wafted up.' "Ora. Pro Nobis" it was playing, and for the moment I was struck by the oddity. It was only when the tune changed to "The Belle of New York" that 1 wondered how a, band came to be playing here at all. The fact is that it was Sunday afternoon, and some Australian troops in rest from Bullecou'rt were not far away.

A small group of thorn was at lliafe niorK'nt in ths' crypt, now open ti> (bo sky, examining .with Antipodean in* (.crest a liea.p nf skulls of martyrs of the Revolution. Not far away we came to.

the headquarters of an Australian Infantry Brigade, for all the world like a seaside camp, and I had a most interesting chat with the Brigadier-General, a young Western Australian officer. The brigade had done its work mosfe-t-horoughly at Bullecourt, and was now in rest. The General's experiences on the Somme and since are typical of what has been happening in these.last fruity months. y TRAINING IN- THE WAR ZONE. I was much interested in the General's remarks on training. He strongly favours doing most of the training in I France. 'Not only does it avoid the innumerable distractions of camp life in England, but it brings the men in close touch with war conditions. "They are continually rubbing up against battalions just going to and just coming from the trenches, and they get fired with the war Vspirit, and learn thing 6in half the time they would take otherwise. It is so much a matter of environment. At first many of the men don't care whether they g&- to the war or not. After a time, although they have previously done so much training in England, you would not know them for the same men; and we have had them cheering when they- are ready to start for the front." I remarked that this question had been under discussion in New Zealand. "My absolute advice," the General replied, "ie,, bring the men here for training. It is going on all about them, and they will learn in half the time. Besides, it is a consideration now to save shipping, and bring them here in one voyage, rather than in two."

Our route from ; Bapaume led back along the historic road from Albert, through Courcelette, Le Sara, Flers, Martinpuich, Warlencourt, and Pozieres. One after the other the German trenchlines appear, wide belts of chalk and shell-holes, desert of vegetation, but not more, desolate than the rest of this terrain. It has been a season out of cultivation,! and 'to-day, as far as the eye can see, it is blooming luxuriously with the wild turnip. Here and there, like large, tailless mice crouching to carth 1, are the dark and rusting outlines of "tanks" put out of action. Each village is poiuided flat, a white, stain on the plain. Each wood- is obliterated, its place marked by only a few shattered, stubs pointing skyward, and sprouting here and there near 'the ground. One sentinel rises from the plain—the famous Butte de Warlencourt, torn and upheaved like the ridge of Vimy, and looking down on the graves of thousands of ours and of Hun dead. Three crosses only appear on its crest, to commemorate ithe dead of three separate battalions of the Durhams. At the- foot, in a mine-pit, are the emplacements of our own machine-guns, and enough discarded ammunition to furnish a revolution for Guatemala. It is so everywhere, for war cannot wait to tidy up. It is the finer feelings cl tiie soldier that have paused long enough to mark with some token of respect the graves which are thickly sown all along this road from Albert to Bapaume.