THE OLD WAR ZONE

Evening Star, Issue 20555, 6 August 1930, Page 3

THE OLD WAR ZONE

FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER THE SOMME OF 1916 [Written by ,7. G. Holmes, late N.Z.M.G. and Tt.B., for tlio ‘ Evening Star.’] Albert was not an actual gateway to the Somme tor tbo New Zealanders. By way of Dernan Court and Fricourt or Mamcfcz most of ns entered that grim battle area in September, 1916, after long marches through pleasant, peaceful valleys between Abbeville and Amiens. But Albert was not far off. It was still a town, and famous for the statue of tho Virgin and Child that hung precariously from the towers of its church. Many of us then saw’ Albert, and a few weeks later shrunken units of the division entrained from tho station of that town to rest and renew themselves for fresh efforts on the Ypres front. Some of us, too, saw Albert again two years after. It had been within tho grasp of the enemy only a few months before. Now the battle front had recoded far from it. Bapaumo and Cambrai had been captured. The BapaumeAlbert road had become an untroubled highway far in tho rear. Albert was a heap of broken bricks and stone. , Tbo statue of tho Virgin and Child had long ago fallen, and its fragments had been buried under the debris of the rest of tho church. The reborn Albert of to-day is oven more astonishing than Annentieres. Albert had been a small and rather mean-looking town without much apparent vitality. To have found it shrunk into a mere village rebuilt out of its old fragments would have caused no surprise. But Albert has grown again almost to its old stature. The new church is almost finished. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child shines above its lately-completed tower. The old church was not a beautiful building. It had been a garish Byzantine structure in red brick. So is the new church; but to see a more gracious piece of architecture in its place would not so thrill one as the sight of an almost exact copy of tire old basilica. It signifies something more than the victory and liberation of a people. It symbolises tho triumph generally of humanity’s courage after long trial by war. The war destroyed many cherished things, but it failed to destroy tho faith and tho idealism that have restored them.

A new hotel do ville is yet in the making, and some wooden buildings in the Grande Place still serve the purposes of Mairio and Palais do Justice. A largo school near by has evidently been open for some time. The quiet and the stillness that had seemed so strange to the returned soldier in Armentieres become almost oppressive in Albert. Remember he has suddenly passed from 1916 to 1930. Ho has not lived through the slow rebuilding of the town. This is still to him the theatre of war with much of its scenery. There are still broken walls with gaping shell holes. Ho is viewing everything about him with a double vision. The town and the country to him arc like a print made from a twice-exposed negative. The streets are almost empty except when the children are released from school. Vet at first they are thronged with shadowy figures in khaki, with limbers and 'with lorries. Then these fade away into the actuality of to-day, and ho feels that it is he who is a solitary ghost. The division and all other divisions must have moved on. Somewhere over the far horizon to the west there must be the sights and the sounds of war again—a lino of vigilant balloons on the skyline, bursts of smoke and vast encampments. There are two well-remembered roads out of Albert, one to Bapaume and the other to Peronne. The road to Bapaume was better known to the Australians and Canadians in 1916. road was most tramped by New Zealanders. A .short ride along it and sign posts guide one at cross-roads to Fricourt and Mametz. The landscape now is unrecognisable. This country is a vast undulating expanse of young green verdure, mostly wheat. It rolls in long, low waves. In the shallow valleys are little clusters of warm red cottages grouped round a church spire. Such now are Fricourt and Mametz. One passes over another ridge, and there, presenting a similar picture, are Coutalmaison and Bazentm, or Montauban and Longueval. There are also patches of a darker green marked by thick woods—Gnillemont Wood, Delvillo Wood, and High Wood. One never saw a landscape like this in 1916. It was the’ beginning of an early winter. Most of the land had been bared by shellfire and trench digging. It was brown or black soil, soon to become mud. The villages were mostly rubble of a lighter colour, crushed close to the earth. The woods were gaunt black skeletons, and the graveyards of many men us well as trees. All around Fricourt and Mametz was a vast encampment. The crest of each wave of land was seared with broad grey lines where the chalk had been upturned to make trenches. Each ridge had been fought for or was still to be fought for. To-day It is possible better to realise the value of those ridges when the wide panoramas they reveal can be surveyed m security and leisure. Many parts of these old battlefields seem tp present a new form to-day, because in 1916 we mostly had to examine them from the ground level. Wo had only a worm’s eye view of them from our trenches. Many steep, formidable slopes of fourteen years ago appear to have been planed down to very gentle rises today.