The Nenana daily news., 1918-12-13
SHOWS GHASTLY EFFECT
 OF GREAT WAR

France.-The country over which
 the Americans fought their way
 northwest from Verdun presents picture of ruin, destruction and de-
 solation The villages are unin-
 habited and homes seem but sepul-
 chres.
 Torn by mines causing huge
 craters, gashed by bombardments which made hundreds of shell-holes
 and strewn with broken or aband-
 oned guns, wagons, heaps of ammu- milton, helmets and all the other
 debris of four years of desperate
 fighting, the whole route betray>
 the awful effects of war
 Everywhere, in every direction and protecting each slightest angle and nook, across the roads until torn away by shells or human hands, arc l ISooHtASoo SIi anus oI pdTDeu wire,
 most of it rusted by the rains, crazily topsy-turvy on it's supporting stakes that have fallen to right and left. If it takes four years to win the war;" said some casual visi-
 tor to- the front, ''it will take six years to roll up the barbed wire that
 has been used in winning it." Take, for instance, the trip from ruined, desolate Avocourt northward to Malancourt and Montfaucon, the scene of some of the bitterest fight ing of the entire war. Avocourt was in ruins before even the American offensive started.
 For a solid mile northward the road winds across foothills that once were covered with green trees, but now. are shorn and bare. Gigantic mines have torn the road in twain and gouged out holes fifty and more feet deep. a hundred and mole feet across, to get around or across which engineers have had to exercise their ingenuity and the surrounding coun- try, stripped of it's wood, has fur nished the rock Fortunately there is plenty of that
 To either side of the road are he remains of what were once liva }! comfortable dugouts and buildings, blown into thousands of pieces by discharges of explosives when the enemy retreated. Farther afield and and as far as the eye can reach across the low hills are hundreds and thousands of shell holes their craters overlapping, big and little holes from missiles of every char acter, that have torn and scared l the earth almost beyond the nope of redemption.
 Everywhere is the debris of the 1 battlefield, guns, helmets, articles i of clothing, piles and heaps of am munition, broken-down md sp';nt- | cred wagons, caissons and trucks. ] And, if one go over the scene soon enough, bodies awaiting burial.
 The comparison between Malan- court and Avocourt is striking-be- cause the former has suffered so much more. Buildings TO longer have even a semblance of their for mer state. Where in Avocourt walls at least stand here and there, in Malancourt everything has been razed as though with dynamite, and the crumbing remnants were seized upon to rebuild the shattered roads and make them passable for the in- satiable armies ahead that required Il more and even more ammunition. and food and supplies.
 Neither Malancourt, nor Mont faucan, nor any one of score of towns within the sector where the Americans operated has a single living inhabitant left. In every di- rection is waste of craters and up- torn earth. It is the quintessence of desolation and nothingness.
 The once beautiful wooded slopes and hills are now torn and gashed. Great artillery bombardments have stripped hillsides of all but the 'tumps of their trees, which tower