DRAWN TO THE SPOT

Evening Star, Issue 18158, 26 December 1922, Page 3

DRAWN TO THE SPOT

WAR WIDOW’S PILGRIMAGE. A well-known Scottish journalist is at present touring through the war zone, and in the course of one of his latest letters he writes:—“Before leaving Armentieres I had a conversation with an Australian widow who was visiting Europe for the first time. She had been in Armentieres for two months, having come straight up-country from Dieppe, and every day she visited the grave of her husband, who is buried in one of the cemeteries just outside tho town. “ Speaking no French, and having no friends, she had no curiosity as to any other part of the country or its sights. Paris,, or any of the larger cities, did not interest her, and, although she had arranged to go to London for a week before returning south, the crossing had been postponed many times because of that sacred spot in an insignificant part of Northern France, which had drawn her irresistibly over thousands of miles of ocean. " ‘ I shall never come back,’ she told me, ‘ and I feel that only now am 1 Taking farewell of my husband. Just as in all earthly partings one shrinks from tho last look, so am I conscious of the fear of a deeper kind of desolation now that- I know where he lies.'