LIFE ON THE BATTLE FRONT.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12061, 17 July 1917, Page 8

LIFE ON THE BATTLE FRONT.

SOLDIERS BILLETED IN ANCIENT - • CRYPTS. PIPERS AMONG RUINS OF EAMOUS MANSIONS. (MR PHILIP GIBBS in the "Daily Chronicle.") "War Correspondents Headquarters. Our men, Living amidst ruin tli.i.s side of St. Quontin, have settled doivn to this lifo of open war faro as though tlicy bad known nothing else. Whether the tragedy of it all sinks into them I do not know, but they whistlo music-hall tunes in the vast rubbish heaps which were once old chateaux of France, and sleep and stack their rifles in ancient crypts among the coffins of French aristocrats who died before or just a little after tho French Revolution, and iind shelter from wind 'and rain in poor little sacristies filled with statues of saints adjoining churches wrecked by explosivo charges beforo tho Gorman soldiers went-their way.

One sees the strangest contrasts of life and death in all this countryside, as when yesterday J came across .a Highlander playing his pipes in; a wild and merry May on an aval an chef of old red bricks which once formed part of a great mansion of France with many terraces lined with white statues of Greek goddesses now lying maimed and rmitiliatcd among the great rubbish heaps. By the roadside on my way T saw somo English soldiers resting, and close to them was a marble tablet stuck up in a heap of earth. T read the. words oarved on the stone, and it told me that here Avas the heart of Anne Josephine Barandor, Marquise de Gaulaincourt, who died in Paris on January 17, 1830. Poor dear heart of Madame Ja. Marquise! In a. vault near by all the .tablets of her family had been smashed, and the coffins laid bare, but there wasi no little niche to show where the lady's heart had been.

Outsider in the churchyard there was. a, great tomb to the memory of the French soldiers who fell in 1871, and next to them the graves of German soldiers killed in this Avar, and a Avooclen cross to Second Lieutenant Nixon, of tho Royal Fling Corps, killed Tiere behind the German lines on July 19, lOio. ': A STIRRING PICTURE. One of the most stirring pictures of the Avar I have seen was after a battle, when the pipers of tho Gordons pla.yed in a splendid way to the battalion which came out of the battle. "Highland Laddie" was the regimental air, and all around .tho pipers stood Scottish soldiers, covered with mud of the Scarp l ?, a,nd old French men and women, Avho had lived doAyn in caves during great bombardments, and now camo up to hear the music of war and love, so strange to them.

Ono old woman danced a little, and was eager to sa.y something in French to all theso Scots. I translated her words. She wanted to say that onco before she bad heard the pipes. It Avas in' 1870. when German peasants from the hills, brought back, as prisoners, had played bagpipes in the street. These are little pictures, of our soldiers' lifo in Avar, I liko them, lietter than others I have seen.