TRAGEDIES OF THE WAR.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 274, 23 December 1914, Page 6

TRAGEDIES OF THE WAR.

WHAT INVASION MEANS TO FRANCE. Mr Philip Gibbs, who has sent some of the best dispatches from the war, gives this vivid picture in the ''Daily Chronicle" of what the invasion of their eountry is meaning to the French people. '' England is sending the best of her sons to fight for honour's sake and civilisation; and the imagination of our people is beginning to realise, though still slowly, I think, the tragic significance of this worst of wars,." he writes-, "But it is impossible, Jam sure, for. people, safe at home in England, in the peace of old country towns and the quietude of English villages, to understand, even dimly, the meaning of invasion by hostile armies. Its Misery and Horror.

"They understand it here in northern France. They know the misery and the horror of it. It is a great fear which spreads like a plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy's troops. It makes the bravest men sick, with .cowardice when they think of the women and children. It makes, the most callous man pitiful when he sees those women with. their little ones and old people, whose place is by the hearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint'with hunger and weariness, or pleading for places in cattletrucks, -already-.overpacked with fugitives,.,.or wandering, about unlighted at night for any. kind of lodging, and theti, 'finding none, : sleeping' on the doorsteps of shuttered; houses and under the poor shelter of overhanging gables. ~., v Missing! .-■.■ . "At the. present time in this part of France there are thousands of husbands who have lost their wives and children, of families who have been divided hopelessly jln the wild confusion of these retreats'from a brutal soldiery. They have disappeared into the maelstrom of daughters, sisters, mothers, and old grandfathers and grandmothers, most of them without money, and all of them dependent for their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the. French newspapers there are long lists of enquiries. ; " 'M. Henri Planchet would be deeply grateful to anyone who can inform him of the whereabouts of his wife. Suzanne, and of his . two little girls, Berthe and Marthe, refugees from Aire-' sur-Lysl' "''" '' - ''.-.'" " ' Mine. Tardien would be profoundly grateful for information. about her daughter, Mme, des Eoehers, who fled from tlie destroyed town of Albert on October 10, with her four children.' "Every day I read some of these lists, with a pain, in the heart, finding a tragedy in every line, and 'wondering whether any of these missing people are among those whom I have met in the guards-vans of troop trains, huddled among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, patient in their misery, or in the long "columns of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley below the hills where German guns are vomiting their shrieking shrapneK •■■.-: lmagine the English Case.

, "Imagine , such a, case in England. A man leaves, his office in London, and takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and children are waiting supper for him. At Weybridge ihe train comes to a dead halt. The guard runs up to the engine-driver, and comes back v to say that the tunnel has been blown up by the enemy. It is reported that Guildford and all the villages around have been invaded.. f Families flying from Guildford describe, the bombardment of tlie town. A part of it is in flames. The Guildhall is destroyed. Many inhabitants have been killed. Most of the others have. fled..

"The man who was going home to supper wants to set but to find his wife and children. His friends hold him back in spite of Ms struggles. 'You are mad!.' they shout. 'Mad. . . .' He has no supper at home that night. His supper and his home have been burnt to cinders. For.weeks he advertises in the papers for the. whereabouts of his wife and babes.:: ; Nobody can tell him. He does not know whether they are dead or alive. ! Everyday Tragedies. "There are thousands of such cases in France./' I have seen this very tragedy only yesterday —a man weeping for his wife and children swallowed up into the unknown, after the destruction of Fives, near Lille. A newborn babe was expected. On the ■ first day of life it would receive a baptism of fire. Who can tell this distracted man whether the mother or child lives? "There'are many villages in France to-day around Lille . and Armentieres, St. Omer and Aire, Amiens and Arras, and over a wide stretch of country in Artois and Picardy, where, in spite of all weariness, women who lie down beside their sleeping babes can find ,no sleep for themselves. For who can say what the night will bring forth? "Perhaps, a patrol of. Uhlans, who shoot peasants, like rabbits as they run across the fields, and who demand wine, and more wine, until in the madness of drink they begin to burn and destroy for mere lust of ruin. So it was : at Senlis, at Crepy-eri-Valois, and last week in many little villages in the region through which I. have lately passed. "It is never possible to tell the enemy's next .move. His cavalry comes riding swiftly far from the main lines of the hostile troops, and, owing to the reticence of official news, the, inhabitants of a town or village find themselves engulfed in the tide of battle before they guess" their danger. They are trapped by the sudden tearing-up of railway lines and blowing up of bridges, as I was nearly trapped the other day when the Germans cut a lin.e a few hundred yards away from my train. If I had passed that few hundred yards ten minutes earlier I should have been caught in the trap, like scores of poor people who are now without any way of escape. - The Exodus Begins.

"Yet the terror is as great when no Germans are seen, and no shells heard. It is enough that they are coming. They have been reported —often falsely —across distant hills. So the exodus begins, and, with perambulators laden with bread and apples, in any kind of vehicle—even in a hearse —drawn by poor beasts too bad for army requisitions, ladies of quality leave their chateaux and drive in the throng with peasant women from whitewashed cottages. Perhaps in a little while both the chateau and the cottage will be buried in the same heap of ruins. The Eeturn Home. "In a week or two, perhaps, the enemy is beaten back, and then the

! most hardy of the townsfolk return ' home.' I have seen some of them going home —at Senlis, at Crepy, and other places. They ,e6me back doubtful of what they will find, but soon they stand stupefied in front of some charred timbers which were once their house. They do not weep, but just stare in a dazed way. They pick over the ashes and find burnt bits of former treasures —the baby's cot, the old grandfather's chair, the parlour clock. Or they go into nouses still standing neat and perfect, and find that' some insanity of rage has smashed up all their household, as though baboons had been at play or fighting through the rooms. The chest of drawers has been looted, or its contents tumbled ou]t upon the floor. Broken glasses, bottle's, jugs, are mixed up with a shattered violin, the medals of a grandfather who fought in - '7O, the children's broken toys, clothes, foodstuff, and picture frames. I have seen such houses after the arriving and going of the German soldiers. "Ruin and death eome with this invasion. In the war zone there is no safety. Sixty miles or more from the German lines hostile aeroplanes skim through the sky, dropping bombs over quiet little villages. Yesterday, not far from where I write these words, a woman went out with her baby to speak with a neighbour. A moment later the mother and child were both lying dead in the roadway. A German aviator bad passed in the clouds. '*