THE NEW LIFE.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 September 1920, Page 8

THE NEW LIFE.

FOB WHICH THEY WENT DOWN TO DEATH. The Miracle of the Reviving Transforma- > t>on of the Battlefields.—What the Returning Natives Have Done. ' London, June 18. "There can be nothing but praise for the manner in which the authorities have discharged their duty to the British dead and to the relatives who mourn them. The clearing of the battlefields has been a grim task, and the time has not yet come for the release of the labor companies which the Army left behind. No one can realise what khaki means to us until ho has wandered for hours amid these desert solitudes and suddenly come on a working party in the setting witli which he will always associate the fighting uniform of the British Army. Or, again, he may chance on a score of soldiers tending the graves in a distant cemetery and keeping, them sweet and frestiv until the day when the permanent design will be carried out. "Spring flowers are blooming under the shadow of the white cross. The battlefield stretches, yellow and red, on cither side of the cemetery into the blue distance of that reviving world for the promise of which British soldiers freely gave their lives. Here they lie, the most gallant company that ever left our shores- Humbly we lay our tribute of reverent pride upon their simple graves, and highly resolve that the torch which they lighted shall never be !ex- ' tinguished. For their name liveth for evermore." —Times Special Correspondent on the Battlefields. "In the whole stupendous record of these last years, few things stand out so>mpressively as the transformation lof the battlefields since the Armistice," says a Times Special Correspondent who is revisiting the battlefields of the /Western Front.

"Nature and man have wrought such changes in the appearance of the devastated areas as to assure their redemption within a period of time which would have seemed incredible to the soldiers who sowed these fields with shells and sprayed them with poison gas, with never a chanee of rotation ■as j season followed season. "Many landmarks of the war have already disappeared, and the battle areas are being cleared up with such speed that the day is not far distant when it will be impossible to trace the fighting line except by the stones of a mined building and the stumps of a blasted wood, RETURN OF THE NATIVE. nature has had its share in this wonderful recovery, man has made his contribution in full mueaaure. Nothing is more inspiriting than +.he return of the native to the home from which he was driven by a ruthless foe, who destroyed his beautiful cities, laid waste his fairent fields, hacked to pieces the 1 tools of his industry, stole his property and scattered his stock, and to all appearance brought ruin, complete and irictrieyable, on on» of the .most flourishing regions on the face of the earth. Yet this land, which so lately seemed dead, is alive to-day. "A ihrge part, of the former population of the devastated districts returned home, and men and women are laboring, as assuredly no other nation in the world is laboring to-day, at a task of ri'conftraction which would have seemed almost beyond the compass of mortal strength. ' Most blessed siffht of all,, i&tle children are there for a beacon to light these indomitable workers on the" rugged road which they have chosen to trend. For it is pour less enfants in the end that the old hamlet is being rebuilt and the fields around it are i again being brought under cultivation. "Villages which have been razed to the around ma awakening from a sleep almost as deep a* that of death. Cities which had been left no more than heaps of rubi'sb have already reached the first storey, Man is showing that he can create," where lately he was a mere destroyer. This is the supreme message of the battlefields in the new era of peace—the love of home, the power of hope, the consciousness of the dignity of labor, and the proud confidence of humanity in its destiny, LIFE IN THE SALIENT. "It was only to be expected that the French and the Belgians would strain every nerve to restore such famous cities as'Ypres, Armenticres, Lens, and Arras to something like their old state. What is so remarkable is the revival of scores of village communities, wliiah only a few months ago were no more than names. Lasting fame had been brought to many of them, but at the price of their utter effaeement. •'Nowhere was there such a complete crushing out of the habitations of man a* in the foreground of the Ypres salient. At the time of the Armistice, the only buildings which appeared above ground between Kemmel and Houlthoulst, except in #ie mother city herself, were the chain of concrete pillboxes which showed up like white growths of fungus on the blackened landscape. How different is the scene to-day! "The German strong points still stand cut in the fields, forlorn and mostly forgotten, while there are springing up all over the country-side and converted army huts of tin, humming with the new activity of that greater fight for existence which has the plough for its most formidable weapon. A SOMME MARVEL.

"These, of course, are no more than oases in the gaunt desert of, the Ypres salient. But they are the beginning of a new life, the cadres, as it were, of the social organisation which is to be. It is, however, the Somme battlefield which affords the crowning example of this wonderful rebirth. A score of villages, whose names were household words in every part of the Empire less than four years ago, are rising again from their ashes- Slowly and painfully, it is true. But there are faint beams of light now in that great tract on which eternal darkness seemed to have fallen between Albert aiid Bapaume and Bray and Peronne. 'Wonderful, indeed, the courier remarked. 'But I will show you what once was a village where no stone is left standing upon another, and there is no life of any sort. . It has been so completely blotted out that it is impossible to trace even the sites of the houses which formerly stood there. Nobody has ventured back to that grassgrown patch of levelled land, and it ia incredible that any attempt should ever be made to settle there again." fi } A CRY OF ASTONISHMENT. "The village to which the courier re' ferred was Guillemont, on the outskirts of that once terrible platform of down which rises in the triangle between High Wood, Pelville Wood, and Trones Wood. On approaching the site along the road from Ginchy, he uttered a cry

of fistoMshment. He pointed to the-epot behind the war-time sign-post, which showed where the {juillemont of our soldiers', travail had stood. He was wrong; n&W life had been breathed even into Guillemont. There were four wooden houses, complete and- in occupation, where the courier could discover, when he passed that way only a month before, no stick or stone or sign of life. there were four families ready to delve and dig for their daily bread in the home of their fathers. So even Guillemont is not one with Nineveh and Tyre." /