WHY FRANCE IS BITTER

Otago Witness, Issue 3316, 3 October 1917, Page 62

WHY FRANCE IS BITTER

GERMAN GROSSNESS. British Headquarters Franco. The French have taken a remarkable interest in Australian and New Zealand i .-oops sinco thej' came to France, writes Captain 0. E. W. Bean, Australian Pres 3 Representative with the Commonwealth Forces. French and Russian correspondents have constantly visited the front held by tho Anzac Corps. And when the French Government recently invited the Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, and South African correspondents to visit the French front, tho offer was eagerly accepted as giving us an opportunity of knowing at first hand something about the French, for in all this tiresome war, if there is one subject upon which every Australian officer has agreed, and, indeed, every man in the British armies in Franco, it is their whole-hearted admiration for the manner in which the French army and the people have faced the war. Whatever discussions there may ever be around the oamp fires as to whether this o>- that army or people have pulled their full weight in the struggle, there is one people as to whom there is not and never will bo any doubt —and that is the French. For two years, while the British Empire was getting under way, the French sustained numerous losses in holding at bay the areat mass of tho German power m tho West. At the end of it they took the offensive on the Somme, when the Germans admit that they thought the French offensive power was ended. And they managed to comb out of their thinned numbers a sufficient reserve to make two further heavy offensives in the present year. Last week the four of us—Canadian, New Zealander, South African, and Australianwere allowed to sec some of the country in which the French have been fighting the Germans who invaded their land. IN THE INVADED TERRITORY.

Tho first thing that hits you in this French area of war—the first obvious certain impression—is that none of tho rest of us, •however hard and willing the tight have a knowledge of war—the real thing---in the same way as the invaded countries have. We others can argue about tho right and wrong of war; there was no argument with tho French. They were not asked it they wanted war. The German came in and left them to buy him out of their country or fight him. And now, after nearly throe years, when they have fought him out 01 great stretches of it, the German leaves it to them with their fruit trees ringbarked, cheir houses blown down with guncotton charges under the corners, their young girls ynd women up to middle age carried off; and the childien whom Germans have bred during their occupation hurried off into Germany to be brought up in heaven knows vrhat state of orphanage to make the German recruit classes for 1935-1936. The French are noticeably more bitter than the British. It is not uncommon to see tho villagers shake their fists at tho ■'dirty Germans," as they call them, when German prisoners are marched down the street, and ask why piisoners should be taken at all. Ono has known a Frenchwoman to becomo white and quivering with rage at the mere presence of a newiyeaotured German behind the sentry in the open door of the guardroom. It is curious that the Germans are far more bitter against the British than the French. It is some of our prisoners whom they are "punishing" twice. In going through villages in which the Germans before their retirement had been facing the French, we saw painted up -in large letters on the houses beside the street "Gott strafe England/' Tho French had blacked one of these notices completely out. THE MARK OF THE BEAST. In tho villages and cities which the Germans evacuated or were expelled from in March and April this year the French have carefully wiped out or torn down every trace of them. Three months ago Noyon was full of a busy population of German soldiers and staff officers, and must have swarmed with notices, "It is forbidden to ride in this place," "It is forbidden to walk here," and plastered with proclamations as bapaumo was, demanding the handing over of all metals at a fixed price to be paid in German bonds. It is hard to find a single trace of the German in Noyon to-day. His proclamations have been carefully removed from tho walls or covered with French ones; his signboards have been painted out; even the names of his soldiers scrawled in pencil over street walls have been scratched off by shaving the surface of the stone until the last letter has been removed. The Germans build solid stone memorials to their regiments, and in some places—fcr example in Bapaumo —thc3- have had the decency, or wisdom,- to leave the French cemeteries alone. When the Germans retired early in this spring- all tho French soldiers respected these big German memorials until they came across some of tho French monuments shattered and the graves opened and apparently robbed either for the lead in the coffkis or for private piilag-e. At the chateau of Mont Remind, the owner was carried off into Germany as hostage, and the coffins in his family graveyard wore broken open. It needed only a little of this sort of thing to raise the temper of the French troops whenever they came across some pompous Prussian monument erected in their country. A KCLTURED CARTOON.

The Germans seemed to have treated French cemeteries and shrines as their individual fancy seized them. Often they left them untouched. The graves of German soldiers are found in most French cemeteries or in neat, well-kept cemeteries beside them. Unless the Germans thought they were going to be in France for ever, ordinary prudence would have made them preserve the French cemeteries as well as their own. And yet we are told of places where the hedges of trees had been cut down or dug up from the French cemetery and planted around the German or French gravestones taken to make a German regimental monument.

There is one relic of the Germans which is being preserved with great care in the village of Suzoy, near Noyon. In the schoolhouse of this small French village the Germans had a recreation house, or beer bouse, for their soldiers. On the wail of the schoolroom some German artist —a clever artist by' his work—has painted a picturo of the German as seen by a German. Two German soldier devils are 'sitting holding each a long peacock's feather, on which tho Frenchman, Englishman, Belgian. Russian, Italian, and Serbian, and a

psalm-singing Scotchman are balancing themselves precariously over the flames of hell. Nothing that was ever said or painted of the Germans was ever half so gross as those two Germans. The fat, beer sodden faces and enormously swollen bodies ending in elephantine legis like those of some foul beast crawling in prehistoric slime, make the average visitor almost sick to look at them. There was never painted a more bitter cartoon of the kultur which has ruined Germany.