WHERE WAR RAGED

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 78, 29 September 1934, Page 14

WHERE WAR RAGED

ON THE WESTERN FRONT

YPRES TWENTY YEARS AFTER

A EEMADE COUNTRY

Twenty years ago, leaving the impressive old town of Ypres behind him a little to the south, a man might pause at a certain road-junctiou and admire a wide prospect of trees and cornfields, writes W. A. Darlington in the "Daily Telegraph." It was not, perhaps, an exciting vista, for the land was flat and rather featureless; but it had atmosphere and memories. Hero had boon battles long ago. Not far from here the fate of Europe had moro than oneo been decided. But for almost a hundred years now this land had had peace to mature in dignity among its rich crops. A few months later that stretch of country was a notorious shambles. Its fields had been pounded into a mess of swampy mud-flats. Its trees were stumps, its buildings had almost disappeared. The road-junction itself had achieved a sinister individual fame. No man dared pause there now to look at Ypres; but had he done so he would have seen only a heap of tortured ruins. To those who first knew Ypres in the war years and have not seen it since, the Ypres of today is a miracle. The morass of mud has vanished, the country is yellow with corn, the shattered houses have risen again. The observer on the roadway can turn and look behind at a town no less impressive—at this distance —-than of old. He can see woods and scattered trees. At a casual glance he may imagine that all is much as it was before the "SHRAPNEL CORNER." Not for long, however;, for at his elbow stands a significant reminder. It is an unobtrusive sign bearing the words: "Shrapnel Corner." I have just been making a pilgrimage over practically the whole of the country that was once the British front in Prance and Flanders. It is a journey that I have long wished to make, but somehow the opportunity has never presented itself. I did not see the devastated area in process of reclamation, and therefore my mind has been presented everywhere with the same sharp contrast of impressions—the memory of destruction and chaos, the sight of fertility and order. That signboard at Shrapnel Corner first told s me, what I was to be told again and again at every turn, that the effects of the war have almost everywhere been eradicated, except where they have been conserved of set purpose. To me and such as me this is, I repeat, a miracle. If anything seemed certain to us in those days, it was that the scenes of the big trench battles— the Salient, Arras, the Somme, and the smashed villages along the straight road that leads from St. Quentin to Amiens—would never again be put under cultivation. Not only was the land churned out of all semblance to Nature; we felt that it was poisoned, that no seed could live in it. We pictured it after the war as a naked, shameful desert, overgrown here and there, perhaps, with some sort of monstrous weed. That a few years could see it once moro smoothed out into neat acres of corn and sugar-beet was far beyond our wildest hopes. MIRACLE OF WORK. Yet so it is. You may look across Passchendaele, or Delville Wood, or Villcrs-Bretonneux at this moment and watch the peasants placidly getting in their harvest; and only the men who fought over those widely-separated stretches of ground can know fully what prodigies of patience and of heroic hard work have given those peasants their fields again. But though the worst effects of- the war have been so largely blotted out, its signs are everywhere. After the first astonished glance at a landscape which seems to have divested itself of all likeness- to a battlefield, the eye of the ex-soldier begins to note familiar detail. . . Everywhere is going on, quite unobtrusively, the modern counterpart of the ancient way of beating sword into ploughshares. Here, for instance, is a farmhouse, newly built of bright red brick; but its garden is fenced with the looped posts once used by the British Army for its barbed wire entanglements, the outhouse is a converted Nissen hut, and demobilised corrugated iron is being put to a dozen argicultural or domestic uses. At the next farm; a conveniently-sited "pillbox" is doing duty as a barn.

Sooner or later, too, one begins to notice the trees. In my own case it was sooner, for I came up to Ypres not by the normal rotite by Ostend,

but by the route from Calais which our armies used.

From the railway I could see nothing that suggested battlefields till I had changed trains at Hazebrouck. Here, as we leffc the town, I noticed a row of old houses which had come in for trouble, for some were patched with new bricks and one had been completely renovated. After that there was nothing till we ran into Poperinghe Station, once enormously important as railhead for the salient, now just an unassuming, tidy little wayside station, decorated with tyeds of bright flowers. It is from here that the trees begin to tell their talc. The Ypres road, which before the war was a fine continuous avenue of trees, was harried without ceasing. Some of the trees survived. Many of them did not, and have recently been replaced by thin green saplings, which have a sadly inadequate air beside the lofty veterans. Towards Ypres the avenue is regular once more, for there arc no more veterans. If I had not happened to notice that avenue I doubt if it would have been borne in on mo very quickly tlrat in the areas which suffered worst there is hardly a tree left of any size. To the casual glance the country seems normally well-wooded, and it is not at onco apparent that all these woods are only the counterparts in miniature of what went before them. Here and there an ancient stalwart, stripped of boughs, thrusts its way up among them like a naked Gulliver in I Lilliput, and demonstrates that there were giants in the old days; TRENCHES LEFT. It is in the woods that one must look for what is still left of the trenches, for even the industry of the French [and the Flemish peasant does not impel him to clear land that has no agricultural value. i Except for this, the trenches survive only hero and there. Part of Vimy Ridge now belongs to Canada, and a park at Beaumont Hamel to Newfoundland, and at both places the opposing trench systems are preserved as a monument. At Vimy, indeed, a | section of trench has been sand-bagged and duck-boarded in cement. I Tho intention is good, but the effect is to make the place no longer, real. It only recaptures credibility where the cement. end» and the trench runs on, tumble-down and full of brambles, but authentic. Mine craters still exist here and there, though, the majority have been filled in. One, at Messines, has settled down in civil life as a placid but. far from pellucid lako, fringed with bulrushes. Another big one beside tho road at La Boisselle, in the Som.nie area, was shown me as one of the local sights, and there are two others, even bigger, near by. Here and there bits of trench line are in private ownership, and occasionally the owners turn them to commercial use. An enterprising farmer opposite Hill GO who has preserved part of the old Canadian front line as nearly as he can in the original condition makes a charge for admission. He soils as souvenirs the odd bits of war-gear, of which the ground is still full. Happily, however, the temptation to I turn the war into a show in this way lis only yielded to very seldom. This is much, in a world which is too often apt to exploit the finer feelings.