SIX MONTHS AFTER

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 38, 15 February 1919, Page 11

SIX MONTHS AFTER

A REVISITED BATTLEFIELD

NATURE'S HEALING TOUCH. /

The wonderful healing power of Nature is already being seen in the once heavily shelled areas in some parts of France.

EaTly in 1915 (writes Ken Kemp in the Chronicle) I took part in some severe fighting in the neighbourhood of a certain farm in Northern Flanders. For weeks the Boche had shelled our battery, which was situated within, a couple of hundred yards of the main buildings, ploughing the ground in all directions with vast shell craters, stripping a little birch wood into splinters, and reduoing the farm to a heap of ruins. Bay afteir day the sheila cra»hed over j day after day the chaos became more complete, until I wondered if ever the wretohed scene of desolation and destruction would be anything but a witness of the war's "frightfulness."

One morning the German artilleiry scored three direct hits, killing four of our gunners, and badly smashing my arm. The battery itself was rendered useless. In a few days' time I found myself in England, undergoing the process of being patched up for further action. All the glory of the English i spring was around me, and the war seemed very far away. Quickly the months passed away, and at tho end of August I found myself in France again, and, strangely enough, within a few miles of the farm where I was wounded, so ono Sunday I decided to go over and see what remained of the place.

It \t»b a perfect summer's morning, and for once the endless, ceaseless TOar and crack ol tho batteries was hushed. A beautiful mellow haze hung over the country, heralding a hot August day, and once again I stood in the familiar, dusty white rood, down which I had been jolted in the ambulance on my way to the hospital. For the last three or four months tho country round it bad not known the presence of one German shell, and Naiure had quickly got to work. The splintered trees hod shot out fresh branches, and the clusters of cool, juicy leaves gently swayed in the summer breeze. Broad, splashes of sunlight and deep purple shadow danced upon the banks, arid the birch wood was gay with flowers. : -

I walked, on to the farm, and found the

heap of brick and debris by which it was now represented one huge mound, of mosses, rich cool grasses, crowned with a blood-red carpet of poppies, now orange and gold in the dazzling sunshine. Hardly a trace of the absolute desolation remained. Over the ruined entrance to the barnyard a pure white rose had climbed,

and big, heavy sprays of blossom fell in showers on to the ground below. The vast, ugly shell-holes that I remembered so well, had been filled up by Nature herself into perfect little fairy pits of the softest moss, flecked by the blue "bird'seye" and "lady's-smock," with ever and again the masses of crimson poppdes. Here and there a large shell crater had been transformed into a wonderful miniature lake of crystal'water, where grew the wild' stream weeds and yellow iris. The whole scene was a perfect dreamland of Nature, and six months ago it had been a complete chaos of destruction and misery; Thus the kind hand of Mother Earth gently touches the bleeding body of La Belle France, and brings once again the beauty that war has ruthlessly destroyed. Whatever the ugliness and desolation of "No Man's Land" and of the Somme fields; whatever violation the wax may have caused to the woods and forests of the South, the tender, all-healing kiss of Nature will once more restore the land to its former loveliness. Man and' War can

never kill the perfect handiwork oj Demeter.