BATTLEFIELDS REVISITED

Evening Star, Issue 17154, 22 September 1919, Page 8

BATTLEFIELDS REVISITED

j PATHETIC RESETTLEMENT. Press Association—By Teh'grapb—Copyright. Australian and N.Z. Came Association. LONDON. Sin item her 20. i (Received September 21, at 10,65 a.m.) i A special ravvespondeut. revisiting the 'Australians’ old battlefields in France and | Belgium, my.-. Mint the •peasants are striv--1 nig again to raise corn amid shell-holes and smashed redoubts. Weds grow thighhigh amid the ruins and tumbled earth. tho War Office has 205.000 Germans and 85,000 Chinese under British officers clearing up the holds and collecting rusty iron, barbed wire, old shells, and rails. They dynamite the German redoubts for steel girders. Old villagers dig among the mins for hidden'treasures. The chink of the demoli.-dier’s tool resounds across the wide valley where formerly groat battles raged. Souvenirs can a till be found in the woods mid holds in the shape of tattered uniforms and scattered crosses marking graves. As a general rule, along the whole front where the ground is not heavily shelled agriculture is beginning again, but elsewhere there is no sign indeed, no hope—of settlement. Every yard of shell-tortured earth will have to be laboriously treated.