DEVASTATED FRANCE

Colonist, Volume LVII, Issue 13745, 7 April 1915, Page 2

DEVASTATED FRANCE

The one hour of bombardment of peaceful seaside resorts has during six wearisome months been the hourly experience of hard-tried France. The other day an Englishman visited a French artillery position along the Aisne, and in an observation post was conversing with a strong but sad-faced Depute—one of the two hundred who had hastened to the trenches. It was a beautiful sunlit day, and as they looked down together on the Prussian' trenches, some 4000 metres distant, the Frenchman remarked: —"Here in times of peace you have what is one of the most lovely and busy spots of agri--1 cultural France; to-day all is silence and death, and those who are alive have dug themselves into the earth." Again, in a shell-battered village scarce a stone's throw from the Aisne, nestling in a hollow, dominated by a | Prussian battery, a sobbing peasant woman bade the writer enter her shattered dwelling. Outside was a hole, a shell hole, a cursed shot had there' slain the woman's little daughter only the previous day, while another had twisted and contorted the interior of the farmhouse into a shapeless mass of ruin.- In this wretched village the people were living on the rations that the kindly British soldier, go loved in France to-3ay, shared with them, j Here there is a church with Red Cross flying overhead in which English soldiers lay dying. , These from time to time had to be removed to cellars, as the -.estruction of the church was momentarily expected.''—'' Westminster f Gazette."