FRANCE COMING BACK.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 16468, 21 June 1919, Page 6

FRANCE COMING BACK.

SCENES IN .LILLE. THE WORK OF RECONSTRUCT TION. Look at some rough sketches (writes Mr. H. C. Bailey, the correspondent of the London’ Daily Telegraph) from Lille. The landscape is the ineffable flatness of Flanders, now thinly covered with snow, so that its complexion is that of dark pudding under a white sauce. Some houses undamaged, but without a sign of life, are in the foreground, many factory chimneys, of which one by some mysterious dispensation is smoking, stands farther back. Along the frost-bound, glassy road runs a white tram full to the steps. Besides the French women, wives and mothers very' closely attached to their recovered men, and widows watching them, besides Frenchmen who are in varying degrees of transition between civilian and military status, illustrated by complete uniform, bottom half of uniform, scarf, puttees, or cap only or the army and the rest mufti, besides all those there is a large party of British troops carying with them all they posse.se. They are comparing buff papers and discussing whether in the day of judgment a miltary overcoat belongs to the State or the individual. They are,, in fact, going to be demobilised. And this is the dialogue: “1 say, Darky ; will they send us home in civvies, or in this muck?” And the speaker’s eyes look sardonically upon a pair of breeches which must have done the State some service in their time. Breeches of an old vintage. -

To him Darky replies: “Civvies? Not half! You’ll go home in that pair, you will, and what’s the matter with them?”

“Well, they ain’t dressy,” their owner protests meekly, to receive a severe retort:—

“You want to be civilised before you get back, you do,” his friend admonishes him. ' “What’s the good of that? No one is civilised now; no one is going to be civilised for another live years good. You can’t do it.” And he received the general approval ,of his party, and the owner of the breeches said philosophically, “Well, it don’t matter to me. My home where I live is in the middle of a big wood.” And he sighed: complacently. But the pessimist was not done with him. “Ah,” says he, with a world of meaning in it, “and you had better learn to hang on the trees by your tail, my lad. That’s the sort of thing.” So now you know what to expect of a. world at peace, and I leave you to draw what morals there may be. Here is another glimpse of the Roubaix Road. It is crossed by a big railway bridge, which the retreating German methodically blow up, and there is a moss of brickwork and lattice girders by the roadside. In among them some half-dozen Drench mechanics have got to work. Deconstruction has begun, but on a scale pitifully unequal to the damage. Tire girders look about as big as auts in the mountain of ruin. 'Still, work has begun., A year ago, as the Lil'le people are remembering with chuckles to-day, the German Governor, von Graevenitz, published a true Prussian edict requiring the town to clear its streets of snow at tiro double, and promising to fine everybody if it was not done to his satisfaction. There is snow again in Lille in .January, 1919; but this year it is Germans who are sweeping the streets for the Lillois, German soldiers with a big spot on their backs to show that they are prisoners of war, wielding broom and scraper, under the eyes of French poilus, ■ with bayonets fixed. ■Unfortunately, van Graevenitz is not here to see. But this is not the only use for German prisoners here. They have begun reconstruction. The Germans blqw up the bridges over the canal of the Deule, and traffic has been passing over temporary structures. Now the German is most appropriately at work to make good the damage, squaring the old bricks for use, and wielding sledge-hammers on the twisted girder's. It happens that I have seen a great many German prisoners working an England; as well as the familiar parties on the roads behind the front; but £ never saw any of them put such energy into their work as these parties by the citadel of Lille. Heaven knows, if the Germans are to repair the German devastation there is need of all their energy! In spite of victory and armistice, the' plight of the North of France is still grave. Lille is so short of coal that they talk of tire bakers being unable to heat their ovens. No doubt it will not come to that, for there is plenty of energy in. the JJrench administration.' But the great difficulty is transport. French trains are promised for this district, but people are asking if they cannot have motor lorries, too. Remember that the problem of the Department du Nord is to feed some 300,000 people in a pillaged devastated country. Every day there come back refugees and prisoners of war, to find only the shell of a house or no house at all awaiting them, no shelter, no means of livelihood. It is not only a matter of food: it is a matter' of covering in icy winter- weather, clothes, blankets, boots. I say nothing of such luxuries as mattresses and saucepans. There is talk of some 60,000 pairs of footgear for Lille, and many more for other towns. I quote a figure haphazard to illustrate the case. What wo have to realise is that there arc hundreds of thousands of people here worn by the war who have to begin life again from the beginning, as if 'they were cast on a desert island. Talk of the hardships of Germany 1