NOTHING LIKE -IT

Evening Star, Issue 16627, 9 January 1918, Page 7

NOTHING LIKE -IT

""Wihen itihis war is over, or witWn the years which will most nearly follow it, there- will be some new and wonderful towns in the world," -says the Boston ' Transcript.' " They will ho towns,. not merely bracks and mortar, but towns with, souls, towns whose very names will kindle' deep emotion. Nor will these towns possess souls merely in tho sense that they have accumulated memories and become the centre of a thousand stories through the passage of old-fashioned creeping centuries.

" The thing of which we now speak ii a, newer and a different thing. It is born of a mooro strenuous and terrible experience than ever a town had before. It means destruction, and rebirth; it means participation in a tragedy of sacrifice. It means the triumph over evil. " Take Verdun, for instance., Verdun had .fought before this war came upon the world. A fortress town, it had withstood sieges. It had any amount of history. But never before had its stones fallen one by one, and its bricks gone into dust, and ■its streets become trenches of the dead, while it still remained invincible. Victory in destruction—when had the world seen that before? When, before, had a city seemed to personalise the resistance of all good to all bod-, so that above its fallen walls a spirit of victory and peaco seemed to arise and fill all the air—a spirit visible across the seas? I

" Verdun will bo rebuilt, and we Americans shall participate in its rebuilding. It wall not be an old city then. It will be almost wholly new. But above its streets, and its ho'ises, which in their architecture will periiaps bo very oomni3-npla.ee, very unpicturesque, a soul of strength, of resolution, of memory will brood which will bring tears to the eyes 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 be built the passion of 20 nations. "■Nothing like it, outside of Bethlehem. "Of Bheims, of Arras, of poor har-rowed-up Ypres, of *iany a smaller city of •France and Belg.um, very, much the same thing will bs said. And at last there will be beauty outside of beauty ; for when the iron mulls, the coal pockets, the sooty chimneys of Lens are reconstituted, the soul of the struggle of all the years of the war will rise in colors of gold and of rose, and spread its wings of loveliness above the coal city, and with its clouds of smoke the fragrance of a hundred thousand/unrecorded heroisms will be distilled over the earth."