BATTLEFIELDS OF VIRGINIA

Evening Star, Issue 20422, 1 March 1930, Page 9

BATTLEFIELDS OF VIRGINIA

In the course of his recent tour in the United States _ Mr Winston Churchill paid a visit to Richmond and the old battlefields of Virginia. In a special article in the London * Daily Telegraph,’ Mr Churchill tells how he went over the ground in which M'Clellan and Lee’s armies manoeuvred ami fought in the seven days’ battle, and of tho fortunes of war in that famous conflict. Next he was nt Fredericksburg, sixty miles out of Richmond, the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting between North and South. “ Here,” he says, “ perhaps more soldiers have perished in an equal space than anywhere, excepting round Ypres and Verdun. Here tho campaigns lie one upon the other; and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville are overlaid by the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. The trenches criss-cross one another; the monuments of dead commanders and shottorn regiments are of different years. An earthy palimpsest of tragedy!” At the “ Bloody Angle,” in the salient of tho Spotsylvania lines, Mr Churchill’s guide was an old farmer of the locality, who had as a child gone over the field when it was piled with dead.