A GREAT DAY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17502, 19 December 1918, Page 6

A GREAT DAY

[ 1 ! t I I i > > ===== 3 ! 1 _ -fc _ I LIBERATED TOWNS. (By Pheot Gums, in the Daily Telegraph.) War Correspondents' Headquarters. ,y- France, October 17. ine enemy has apparently abandoned x Lille and Tottrcomg, those great ind-ustrial towns of Northern France which he heW so i 10 , n S ?* k" 3 trump cards in the devil's gamble of this wax, and we are following him up. 3 We have taken Lombartzyde, on the coast, and have captured Ostend. From one end 1 of the line to the other the German armies ■. are in retreat from great portions of France . and Belgium, and it is a landslide of all 3 their ambitions and their military power. To-day I have 6een scenes of history of which many people have been dreaming through these years of war, until at last they were sick with deferred hope. I have seen Belgian and French soldiers riding through liberated towns, cheered by people who have been prisoners of war in their own houses for all these dreary years under hostile rule which was sometimes cruel and always hard, so that their joy now is wonderful to see, and makes something break in one's heart at the sight of it, because one understands by these women's faces, by the light in children's eyes and by the tears of old, gnarled men, what this rescue means to them, and what they have suffered. I have not yet been into Lille for I only just have the news that the enemy has abandoned it, and I was in another part of our regained territory, at •Konlersand Iseghem, and in villages round Courtrai In Lflle the first news of the enemy s flight was received by oar airmen ■w-ffe+l, ■ v. Pe i?Pr e to them with their handkerchiefs, waving franticallv , to give them some message. Our airmen guessed that it was joyful news, and could mean only one thing. After that a civilian came over to our lines and said " You can go m. The enemy has {rone in the night " **»»* «* -countered

PRIZE OF MANY VICTORIES. This regaining of Ldlle is the most wonderful occurrence since the combined offensive of the Allies on the western front began in August last, and is the prize of many victories won by the heroism of young officers and men and by the fine strategy of Marshal Foch, whose brain has been behind all these movements ofi men. One feels the horror of this war is lifting, and that tho iron ramparts of tho enemy, so strong against us year after year, in spite of the desperate efforts of millions of gallant men who dashed themselves against those barriers, have yielded at last, and that many gates are open for our men to pa£S through on their way to victory. This morning 1 went- again over the old belt of battlefields out from Ypres and beyond Passchendaele, through which the combined armies of Belgium, France, and Britain struggled and surged to keep up with their vanguards. Over the shell oraters and the. rutted roads, sometimes axle-deep in mud, in slow columns of turbulent traffic poured our guns and transport of the three nations, following Tip the pursuit, bringing up food and ammunition and men and more men. Tho pursuit is not a dashing charge. Men shout to each other in three tongues to clear the way and ease their feelings by furious shouts and gusts of laughter because it is all so slow. But it is too fast for the enemy. Before he is ready to leave our men are on his heel. Our horse artillery is firing along his tracks before he can escape with his heavy loads. His rearguards are captured before the main body is out of danger. It is very slow, this pursuit, when seen from our side of things, but as quick as a hurrying death to masses of German soldiers.

It quickens beyond the old deep belt of strife, for beyond that there are good roads, except where the Germans have blown groat crafers, and this morning 1 went for many miles through country where there are tmsbellcd fields, where there are cabbage patches, and neat farmsteads, and cottage gardens, and villages with red-tiled ropfs, and houses with glass windows, unbroken glass, by all the gods, bo that it seems like precious jewels to eyes tired of rubbish heaps that were fair towns like Ypres. In one small Flemish town to which I "went this morning—Isoghem, between Courtrai and Thielt—there was' not a house that showed any sign of war, though there had been fierce machine-gun fighting outside its streets, and there were little Flemish shops with fancy thinge in the windows, and a big market square, and convents and colleges, with solid walls and not a shell-hole anywhere. A long column of Belgian gunners drove through the streets, and they wore rcceivd as conquering heroes by 3000 of their country people, who lined tlie pavements and looked out of tho windows of upper storeys and stood m their thresholds. JOYOUS BELGIANS. Almost every house flow a Belgian flag, hidden in collars since four years until this day should come, and women and children ran into the roadway and gave flags to the Belgian gunners, who hang them on their limbers. I think I must have been the first man in khaki to be seen by these Belgian people since their rescue by Fronch and Belgians, for I shared an ovation with a French officer who was with me. "Vive la France " and " Vive l'Angleterre " were cried out by old men and women and yonng girls and children. Every man and boy waved his cap. A Franciscan friar in his brown habit and sandalled feet, with big beads hanging from his bolt, was actually dancing in his doorway with sheer joy, and other monks waved their hands and their beaTds. -

I spoke with some young priests who are professors at a college .there, end eeked

them, some questions. How had ihe Germans behaved? What did they think of things? " Sir," said one of these priests, in good English, " I cannot tell you What wo have suffered. I dare not tell you, lost, I should break down and weep, which would be bad on a day of joy. The Germans wero hard with us. We had no liberty of any kind, and were under an iron oppression. We wore not allowed to go ovon to the funerals of our friends, or from one village to another. Wo had no news of. the outside world, except what was in the German papers, and but for the Spanieh-Duteh Relief Committee our people would have died from hunger. There wore Rood Germans among those in this town. Let us toll the truth about that. There were men who hated war and all its cruelty, but it is their education and their military system which makes them brutal and unsensitivo to human suffering. The officers wore -worse, and in spite of iron discipline, which made their men salute them with rigid faces, 'these German soldiers hate their officers with a deadly and fierce hatred andi ono day will wreak their vengeance.

TJieso priests told me that during recent days tho Germane have made no disguise that they are lost "It is finished with us," they said; "there is no end but in our defeat." Even tho officers admitted that the tide had turned, and that their oidy hope was peace. At Roulers I met some French officers and men, who fought their way into this town, a fine old Flemish town, with a tall bcliry and a spacious market square, and many old churches with noble towers. The Germans did not want to leave this place. They fought for it hard, girdling it with machine guns, and having many field batteries to protect it. But the French forced their way round on two sides, and on tie third side a French battalion waited to got a signal that they should attack frontally. Some of these men were machine gunners, who had marched 22 miles before reaching their line of attack, and then they had to wait under very fierce shell-fire, but at last they sprang up, and went forward into Ronlers.' There was a dreadful sweep of bullets in the streets from Gorman machine guns, and one party of them, with a young officer I met this morning, came face to face with a field battery in the street. The German gunners fired sis rounds. Then one of than shouted out: " Don't shoot! Don't shoot! I am an Alsatian," and ho made the others surrender, his own lieutenant prisoner.

As soon as the French entered Belgium the people emerged from their collars, and ■with cries of joy ran towards the French soldiers and embraced them. One officer I met, a commandant, and a most gallantlooking soldier, was a priest, who, before the war, was a canon at the cathedral of Bcsancon, and a professor at that college. "It was the first time I had ever been embraced by a girl since I became a priest," he told me, langhing, "and I said: ' Hullo! my little one. This will never do, , and I protended to box her ears before telling her' that I had no right to her kiss; but, after all, it was a kiss of peace, and I was not really angry about it." The Mayor came rushing up, and said: "Be careful, "for God's sake! This town is mined." And truly enough there,were big charges of dynamite and trench-mortar bombs, 20 bombs to etnh frightful charge, in the belfry and under the towers of the churches and at tho cross roads. But, by some freak of carelessness—perhaps because they had no other men,—the German command of Roulers had left this mining to be done by soldiers, who did not carry out their orders, except at the cross roads and under one church tower. The gloriousx old belfry of Eoulers still stands, and all the town stands, so that it is still fair to see from the outside, with its beautiful Flemish houses. But each house was gutted before the Germans left. They stripped off the paneHing, toot away the doors and the window panes and every bit of furniture, so that Roulers is nothing but a shell, and there is nothing left to the inhabitants.' Tho Germans wished to send everybody away, and threatened to turn them out at the bayonet-point; but manv hid—one man I met hid for 10 days with four comrades in the chimney of a factory, —and the others refused to go, and showed such passionate emotion that the German garrison was afraid to enforce the order. STRANGE POSITION AT OOURTRAL

There was an astonishing situation at Courtrai to-day. Our Irishmen had been feeling their way close to it, with sharp fighting at Heule and other places on north, the enemy's rearguards falling back before them when their pressure came too hard; and last night they gained possession of that quarter of the town which is divided by tho canal from the main streets and the market place and the famous old belfry, which has rung out the history of Oourtrai for many hundreds of years, in triumph arid tragedy. Some engineers tried to gain bridgeheads across the canal by building pontoons, while they were swept by machine-gun fire from the opposite banks, and succeeded in doing - this, so that some of our men crossed by much daring and in most deadly risk. One officer of ours forced his way into a house where there were some Germans with trench mortars; and when he was blown out of one room he went into another, and was blown out of that, and then into a trench near the house. It was far too deadly a place for our men to stay in small numbers, and they wore drawn back to the west side of the canal, where they remained to-day, still, you understand, holding at least a third of Courtrai on that side. Among those now in the town are the Queen's and Middlesex.

What makes the astonishing drama here is that Courtrai is filled with between 35,000 and 40,000 civilians.. There, again, the enemy tried to force them to leave, and sent away any able-bodied boys and men between 14- and 60, bat could not Induce large numbers of others to go, now that they knew the British were so close. Many men hid themselves, others adopted an attitude of pa6sive resistance, and the German soldiers were afraid to use force. All the women, except a few well-to-do people who went away to Brussels, remained to take the risk of bombardment with liberty as the great prize of courage. So that vast population is still there, for the most part on the other side of the city, beyond the canal, waiting and watching for the moment when the Germans leave and our troops enter to rescue them. But from the west side of tbp canal irmny people are coming throngh our lines, and our _ machine-gunners, lying in ditches and behind •walls and in newly-dug trenches, see women with perambulators coming towards them, and old women hobbling up •with children at their skirts, and men trudging slowly among the patter of machine-gun bullets. Some of these civilians have been killed, but the enemy is letting them escape, and they only have to run the risk of chance shots. They tell the tale of their'sufferings like those others I have seen, but they have the hone that their beatrtiful old city will not De ■ destroyed, because the German soldiers themselves say that they will not blow up in spite of orders. The German gunners are also sparing the place, and are only shelling the outskirte and approaches. It has been a -wonderful day < in this war, and it will be followed by others when our Allied troops will enter many historic towns and give back to France and Belgium much of the country that has been so long divorced; from them. The enemy's retreat will now go fast, and from hundreds of thousands of hearts, scarred, if not broken, by this war's long agony, there is going tip a cry of joy, because the enemy is departing from them and liberty is theirs again, and tidin<rs of those they love on, out side of tho lines, and peace for them, however long the war may last.