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Feilding Star, Volume XI, Issue 2576, 6 March 1915, Page 1

"THE END OF ALL THINGS." OWICKR'S VIVID KAItHATIVK. '< Captain W. B. \Veldi, of the 6th Battalion Gordon Highlanders, in tho course ol' a letter honie, writes: — When 1 attempt to describe what we have seen and heard I find that my pen is not equal to the task. Yesterday I visited a town quite as large as Huntly, on the outskirts of which we are billeted 3 and I never pictured such desolation even in my wildest imaginings of this war of destruction. Picture rows upon rows of houses with roofs shattered, with the windows smashed, with great yawning boles in the walls, through which you see piles of slates and bricks all mixed lip with beautiful pieces of bedroom furniture. Think of unshuttered and wide-open shops, with jewellery, food, and clothing all exposed, and no one with the inclination even to examine what lias been saved. Think of the dwelling-house with ' tables still set for dinner, with the I food, still on the plates, and the wine half-finished iv the glasses. Aud here and there a poor dead doggie, and perhaps v birdcage Avith one or two dead canaries. Put a German inscription on the few doors that are left. Have the drawers and. cupboards burst open, and scatter their contents here, there, and everywhere. Place iv the middle of all this ruination a church with its chairs smashed by the fallen roof, with its images smashed, with its pictures ilapping in the wind which blows , where it will through the breaches made in the walls by German guns. ' Think of walking along streets of houses like that, streets made almost 1 impassable owing to the tangle of , telegraph aud. electric wires. Imagine ! that as you walk along those streets you see an occasional cat moving I calmly along the rows of houses* but j inside, and keeping pace with you I with comparative ease as it leaps j through the broken gables. I Imagine something a thousand times more desolate than I. have: described, aud you have a typical picture of what you know only as a picturesque town in the Xorth of France. It is awful, and as I walked through this place 1 could not help but think of those poor people-—-wo-men and children—perhaps children like mine- -scattering In , fore what n.iust have seemed to them the end of all things. Koine, such thought as , that must have occurred to one of my men, for in a letter home he says thai now he is eager to have a say iv the reckon in;:: with Hie devils that caa have done such damage., Weru