WHAT WAR MEANS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 13 July 1917, Page 8

WHAT WAR MEANS.

AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT'S STORY.

A vivid description of a huge observation mound, which the Germans builfc in the centre of the plain near Courcelette, and used until the Allies drove them back a few months ago is given by Judson C. Welliver in Munsey's Magazine. The- surrounding country was flat, and offered the Germans no facilities for observing the Allied lines; so at the expense of almost unimaginable effort they heaped together a great artificial hillock, "it looked to be nearly a hundred feet high. It was composed of the most consistent and persistent combination of chalk and soil that could possibly attach itself to a pair of trench boots. We labored up to the top of it (says the writer) and overlooked the plain in all directions. The wrecks of several villages could be made out, and ; here and there the skeletons of a few blasted trees; but nowhere was there visible even the ruin of a devastated farm For miles, all the buildings had been swept away so completely that it was impossible to realise they had even been there. We beheld" a seeminglyunlimited waste of trench furrows, paralleled by broad, brownish, uglylooking zones of barbed wire entanglements; of shell-holes half filled with water —water of a strange, rusty-red color, which, as we were told, and could readily believe, represented, human blood drained into these wounds of the earth. It was the most unnerving spectacle of devastation I had seen, immeasurably more horrible than the wreck of a village or city. Broken walls merely suggested that man, in his anger with himself, had set about maliciously destroying something that he himself had I created; but this sight of a scarred and blasted world seemed like a blasphemy. I The effort of the whole world had suddenly turned into a Frankenstein nfonster, lifting its hand against God in the effort, as it appeared, to wreck a universe.

The landscape was a sufficiently sickening spectacle; but the climax of horrors still awaited us. Climbing up the mound, picking our way among tho sheft-holes, we had had no opportunity to do more than watch our step. When we started down, stopping occasionally for closer inspection, we all discovered, as in the same moment, that in the sides of that artificial hill was to be seen the wrecked and shattered gear of war. There were muskets, bayonets, German and British metal helmets, overcoats, empty 6leeves, cartridge- : boxes, ammunition-belts, parts of injfantrymen's kits, blankets, and the i fragments of innumerable shells, great i and small. I Many of the projectiles were "duds" —the imperfect shells that fail to explode. Unfortunately, the duds are highly temperamental things; they are liable to explode at any time, and about the most dangerous business one can engage in is that of experimenting with them. We were constantly being warned to avoid stepping on them, and under no circumstances to pick one un, unless very certain that its car> was gone. The whole war zone of Northern France is strewn with these menaces, and nobody has yet devised a method of gathering them up and making it safe to work the soil where they have been thrown. In the course of motoring, perhaps, two hundred miles through the region which had just been evacuated by the txermans, we saw the most tremendous panorama of wretchedness that this o r any other war has ever produced We passed through some fifty ruined towns and villages, most of them utterly deserted, by their inhabitants, worthless to conquer and to conquered. They all looked more o r less alike