"Journey To The Western Front 20 Years After"

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19130, 26 September 1936, Page 9

"Journey To The Western Front 20 Years After"

MR i,'. 11. Mottrnm's ft real War book, "The .Spanish Farm," is sure of a permanent place in the literature of the war, and his study of the devastated countryside was a notable feature of his book. Mow, after 20 years, Mr. Mottrani returns to France and the places he knew so well, and ii, is all told in "Journey to the Wdsfern Front Twenty Years After." In some places Mr. Mottrani found that time is a great healer, and that there were but few traces of the havoc caused in the days of the war. Mr. Mottrani writes of the old-time trenches:

"The people of St. Quentin and its neighbourhood are increasingly unwilling to show thorn. They want to forget, and who shall blame them? ft was the same all down the now beautiful and peaceful Oise valley, over the hill beyond Kssigny and Soraucourt lo the south. Channy and Xoyon have been rebuilt, the tree have grown again, the roads arc made up. Only those with an intimate knowledge of what the villages were like before can see now where the war passed.

"On the whole, I quitted the battlefields very considerably reassured. In 3018 and 3028 T .had come back to find trenches that I had helped to build, ,only greened over with weeds, and otherwise as J. had left them. Little To Be Found Now.

'■'To-day, outside the '.National .Parks,' museums, memorials, and cemeteries, there is little to be found and that with difficulty. This would not be surprising in the wilderness of the veldt or the North-West Frontier. Brit the zone o; I lie British, armies in France ran through one of the most, closely, elaborately, jealously cultivated' countrysides that can be found in the world that I know.

"I am inclined to change my opinion that our Great War was an awful warning, and next time will be the end of us. 1. think now that whatever power if may he to which we like to attribute those happenings we cannot control, it has not d,one with us yet. .'lt is not so easy to obliterate like we .short-sighted and ill-disposed people have always hoped. "Inanimate Nature makes short work of our exhausting efforts to turn her into a mortuary, and even human nature, to judge by the specimens 1 have lately'met in'Northern France and Belgium, soon forgets, renews itself, and has difficulty in believing that its native place was ever a battlefield, a military zone, an. occupied region, an invaded Fatherland. Did Not Die in Vain.«

"I do not feel that all those men died in vain. When I look round the

world to-day. 1 feel that humanity is

immeasurably more awake than it was 2o years ago, and that all those

deaths have made it so. The pity is thai we cannot turn the mighty means!

<iL' temporary destruction on to wlml is ugly, mean, and ill-conceived, instead of, as so often, destroying what 1 is worthy in order to replace it with! something from which the appreciative! In rn away, j

"Some of the rebuilt and rccultivated battlefields, and a good deal of Britain that escaped, could be blown up again, dug up, cleaned up with advantage, without the loss ,of life or one per cent of the expense that was lavished on making Arras and Yprcs worse. Perhaps some day War Offices will be given "the job of clearing away the eminently e.learable, and some of us may flatten out our ugly towns to make ' the way for better. Who knows?''

Mr. Mottram's journey along the enlire Western front, with his picture of places familiar in the war bulletins as they appear to-day, while informative, are also entertaining.