WAR FRONTS

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6441, 22 January 1924, Page 5

WAR FRONTS

WHAT THE YEARS OF PEACE ARE DOING

The change in the appearance of the old battlegrounds of the British front from Amiens to Ypres is amazing, almost incredible, to anyone who knew the country at the end of the war (writes Boyd Cable in the Times). I' have found it easier to trace on the ground the story of the Battle of Waterloo than to follow the course of the fighting on the Somme, although I was there for nearly six months, went over most of the ground again and again, studied it on the maps often scores of times a day. This is not because the battleground of Waterloo is a tiny spot" compared to the Somme, because I found it just as difficult to trace out one corner of a battlefield in France personally familiar to me and not as big as Waterloo. It is rather because all our old familiar landmarks have almost disappeared, because where we could see from a thousand yards up to five miles, without anything to obstruct our view, there are now clusters of farms, rows of houses, complete villages crowning the heights, low but dense clumps of wood and bush where we used to know only low mounds of brick and stone, ghastly naked tree stumps. Where we picked a way and recognised a route to the front line, through, say, Cuinchy village, by remembering to turn to the right at a bit of a high broken wall, to the left over a tumbled pile of bricks, across a road where a trench cut it, left again into a foot track over the remains of a garden, past some bricks with an iron bedstead,' sticking out of them, we now find a trim, orderly street of brandnew cottages estaminets, farmhouses, a full width cobblestone street, fields without a sign of a trench in sight. It is the same almost everywhere, although there are some spots here and there where the scars of war are still unhealed and remain ugly and disfiguring.