IN FRANCE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17206, 28 June 1916, Page 10

IN FRANCE.

FIRST IMPRESSION OF THE FRONT,

THE UNCEASING WATCH

(From C. E. W. BEAN. Official Correspondent with Australian Forces.)

(Copyright.)

Rights specially secured by Lyttelton

Times.”

British Headquarters, France, April 20.

Rich green meadows. Rows of tall slender elm trees along the hedges. Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch with their thick trunks, showing notched against a distant blue hillside, like a row of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under the tall trees, just bursting into green. _ Violets—great bunches of them in the patches of scrub between tho tall trunks, and yellow cowslips, and white and pink anemones and primroses. You see tho flaxen-haired children out in flic woods and along the roadside gatliei mg them. A rosy-cheeked woman stands in tho doorway of a farm at the crossroads, and a golden-haired youngster, scarce able to run as yet, totters across the road to her, laughing. Only this morning as we passed that same house there tvas the low whine of a shell and a metallic bang like the sound of. a dented kerosene tin when vou trv to straighten the bend in it. Then another. We could see tho white smoke of the shells floating past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few fields away. Drifted slow 1) through the trees, and then came another salvo. There were some red roots near —those of a neighbouring farm but we could not see whether they wore firing at them, or at some sign of moving troops, or some working party, d there were any: and I do not know now. As wo came back that way _in the afternoon there was more shelling further away. The woman in the doorway simply turned her head in that direction for a moment, and so did a younger woman who came to the doorway behind her, then they turned, to the baby again. THROUGH THE TREES-A NIGHTMARE DESOLATION. Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages further on had mostly l»eeu battered and broken. There-' was a road running at a little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been shattered. There was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups of buildings there, all shattered burnt, and gaping, like the tangled nightmare of desolation on tho morning after a great city fire. Further on was opencountry, again where the long communication trenches began to run through the fields, but you could see nono of this from where we stood. Only in tlie distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have noticed, if we had looked for it, an occasional broken tree trunk —snapped off short or broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire. Those distant trees would he growing over our firing lino or the German, It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of its water-logged ditches and tho rain which has fallen miserably almost every day since wc arrived. There is green crass up to -within a few yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches, and not a hinterland of powdered white earth, which was all wo had at Anzac or at Holies. Here you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which, on a fine day, fairly tempts you to lio on it if you are far enough away from tho lines. The country is flat, and you see no 6ign of the enemy’s trenches, or your own—the hedgerows shut them out at half a milo as completely as if they did not exist.

WATCHED. But you realise when you have been in that country for a little while that you have eyes upon you all the iimo —you are being watched its you hiuvo never been watched in your life before. You walk along that country, road as you would walk along the roads about your own home, until sooner or lwtor things happen which make you think suddenly, and think hard. You are passing, a dozen of you together instead of the usual two or three, through those green fields by those green hedgerows, when there is a sharp whizz and a clee and a crash and a shrapnel shell from a German seventy-seven bursts ton yards behind you. ' You are standing at a corner studying a map, and you notice that some working party is passing that corner frequently on some duty or another. You barely noticed that there was a house near you. Twenty-four hours later you hear that that house was levelled to the ground next morning—shrapnel -shell on each side of it to get the range—a high explosive into it burst it no—-and an incendiary shell to burn the rubbish; and one more French family is homeless. It takes you some time to realise that it was you who burnt that house —you and that working party which moral past the cross roads so often. Somebody must have seen you when the shell burst alongside that, hedgerow Somebody must have been watching you all tlm ume when you were loitering with your map at that

corner. Somebody, a t any rate-, must have been marking down from the distance the party moving round those cross roads. Somebody in the landscape is clearly watching you all the time. And then for the first; time you recall that those grey trees in the. distance must be behind tho German lines; that that distant roof and chimney notched against a background of scrub is in German ground; that the pretty blue hill against which the willows m tho. plain show out like a. row of railway sleepers is a barrier to the German trenches; and that from all yonder landscape, which moves behind the screen of nearer trees as you walk eyes are watching for you all day long: telescopes are glaring at you; brains behind the telescopes are patiently reconstructing, from every movement in our routes, on our fields, the method of our life, studying us as a naturalist watches his ants under a glass case. Long before you get near the line, away over the horizon before you there is floating what looks like a fat white garden grub—small because of its distance. Look to the south a,ml north and you will sec at wide intervals others one after the other, until they fade into the distance. Every day brings them out ns regularly as the worms riso after rain, they sit iliero all day long in tho sky, each one .apparently drowsing over his own stretch of country. Hut they are anything but drowsy—each one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain, his telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments, and out on every beautiful fresh morning of spring comes the butterflies of modern warfare—two or three of our own planes low down, and then a white insc-et. very, very high now hidden behind a cloud, now ai> pearing again across the rift. It i<> delightful to stand there and watch it all, "like a play. The; bombs, if they drop them, 'are worth risking any day.

THE REASON FOR CAUTION. But it isn’t the bombs that matter, and it isn’t- you who run the risk; the observer is not. there to drop bombs in most eases, but to watch, watch, watch, watch a motor standing by the roadside, a body of men about some work, extra traffic along a road—and a red tick goes down a map, that is all. You go away, but next day .or sometimes sooner that red tick comes up for shelling ais part of the normal day’s routine of somo German battery. _ So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war correspondent does not wish to give to tho enemy for a penny what he would Madly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell holes around a few deserted earthworks. Somebody in this landscape put a red tick onco against that long forgotten corner.