HUN ARTISTRY SEEN IN STUPENDOUS DEBTRUCTION.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 14287, 2 May 1917, Page 3

HUN ARTISTRY SEEN IN STUPENDOUS DEBTRUCTION.

NO TOWNS LEFT, ONLY HEAPS

RUINS

CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.

(By F. A. Wray.) With the British Armies

m the Field, March 27,

Visiting the Somme lands which the Germans -have evacuated, one's mind is divided between the awful, stupendous desolation that modem warfare causes and a certain admiration for tlie Hun as an artist m deliberate, unnecessary destruction.

The Somme battlefields were a frightful sight to contemplate when fighting was going' on, when hundreds of thousands of men wer c being killed and wounded on both sides. Now, when they are deserted and the work of destruction had been completed, it is doubtful if they ar^ not more frightful still.

Imagine a strip of country twentyfive miles wide where every yard of ground is churned up m a shape almost passing human coneeotion. Or 'try to visualise a great lake over-spreading such an area, a. great latye m which milhon s of little sugar-coned islands five feet m diameter are separated from each other by fifteen feet of water, ten feet deep. WORSE THAN EARTHQUAKES. That gives some notion of this tortured; eviscerated country with the ■Water presenting the shell holes which winter has flooded. Great earthquakes produce small effect compared with the concentrated fire of the modern heavy artillery. . - ' ' ■ Imagine also great heaps of shattered bricks, tiles, and laths. These once constituted prosperous villages. Then one sees the winding trench, protected by sand bags, while thirty yards ahead is row after row of barbed wire. Near each -is a little cemetery covered with* countless crosses, for on every square yard of these trenches many men have lost their lives.

Between Pozieres. now obliterated, and Bapaume stands a h"11 250 feet high called the Butte de Warlencourt. It was the scene last autumn of some of the fiercest fighting of the whole Somme campaign, and was evacuated by the Germans just before Bapaume itself.

DEAD BODIES PROTRUDE. Thousands of soldiers lost their lives here. The bodies of men still protrude out of the ground, which is strewn with shell cases and forsaken • equip-' ment. From the top of the hell one. sees scores of pools. Some of them are red. They are still stained with blood. One not only sees the wilderness of mud and water, but here and there con--glomerations of tree stumps about four feet high. They were once floiirishlW woods. But this is war.

One proceeds to , the scene of more deliberate destruction. Along the road, every alternate tree is felled. Those still standing are cut hclf way through so that the first high wind will bring them down. Many of them have had the bark stripped off. so that, they will die. This is an additional niece of German work, done for no mil'tairy advantage* but purely out of devilish sbite. DESTROY BABY'S CRADLE. There really are no towns left, only, •heaps of ruins, still smouldering. Every piece, of furniture of any value was carted away. What was left wa« piled up m the houses, saturated with tar and paraffin, and then lighted. Just two or three houses escaped. A British Tommy showed me two cradles stacked among a heap of tables .and chairs, all besnattered with tar.

"That makes my blood boil," he said "Is war senseless destruction?"

I talked with a French soldier on the same subject. "It is frightful, unbelievable, but wait till we get into Germany," he remarked. Except for his eyes, he seem ed so cool and cairn that I pity Germany if France ever gets the chance for revenge. P Even the churches m these Picardy towns and villages apparently were mined by -tho Germans. Great pillars Bire now but heaps of ruins. The Germans omitted no desecration. They had deliberately stripDed off all metal fittings, taken away all detachable pictures, and even dragged from the walls of some churches sections of the crosses. CARRY OFF WOMEN. I found what had evidently been ledgers and account books of; some large dry goods store which had been destroyed. All had been deliberately torn to pieces and been scattered to the four winds. Such is the theory of "absolute war." There is not a single inhabitant m Bapaume. The Germans carried the population off. I talked with Frenchmen and Englishmen regarding these wholesale abductions of civilians, especially women. There, aire two theories to explain it, I found: one that the women are taken for immoral purposes, and the other that the Germans aiv*determined to secure every pair of hands available for work. It is a crime against humanity.