A VISITOR TO FRANCE AND BELGIUM.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 June 1921, Page 5

A VISITOR TO FRANCE AND BELGIUM.

NEW ZEALANDER’S IMPRESSIONS.

Writing to a Wellington friend from Paris on March 22 a New Zealiand lady who has been visiting France and Belgium, states that in Ypres a great deal of building is going on, mostly houses, but the Cathedral and Cloth Hall are to be rebuilt. At present they have only been able to dean the rubbish away. Until one has seen it is is impossible to conceive what damage has been done. The buildings in Ypres were mostly brick, and not onlj’ the buildings are smashed, hut the very brides are ground to powder, so that few are of any further use, though they are using them wherever possible. “On the way to the cemetery,” says the writer, “we passed a mound of what looked like rubbish with a few blades of grass growing on it. We were told that it was once the Passchendaele Church. What was the village is just nothing—not a house or a tree or anything at all left. And it had been once a busy little village. One road we traversed was very good—an exception, as most of them are awful. We asked had it been relaid since the war, and were told it had been five times relaid. It required that number to get a good foundation. We went through Alenin on the way to Lille —quite a biggish place, without anything like the same 'destruction wrought, while Lille was hardly damaged except for the railway station, which is new. From Lille all the way to Paris (about five hours’ journey) we passed town after town partly in ruins, and all the stations were new. These brand new stations brought home to use as much as anything how much there is to be done before France can be anything like rehabilitated. Supposing we had to build all the railway stations between Wellington and Auckland—the big ones, that is, and in stone —could we have done it in two years, do you think? Probably half a century will not see done all that is necessary to reconstruct the devastated areas of France.