The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1919-01-25

I0W W7I war zone. To travel d.
NIYxIV rectly from America, al
ways at peace, to Paris,
E9 now resuming much OF
her anti-war activity and
becoming again real capital,
is to forget almost entirely h g
four years and half of agony that
separate Europe and the rest Of the
world from July, 1914, and thus to
eliminate many of the vital questions
remaining to be settled. 1t Is other
wise If one journeys by Ypres. by
Vimy ridge. by the Somme battle
fields. by the regions where five years
ago hundreds Of thousands of people
lived and la bored in smiling fields and
in pleasant towns, regions in which
100000 dead now sleep and sleep in
a desolation beyond human words to
describe.
1t is in the dead cities and even
more in the dead villages of northern
France that one must seek evidence of
what this German thing has meant,
must seek some estimate of that vast
account which remains to be settled
after the German has gone. He has
vanished from the trenches, from the
ruins of the region he had wasted.
AS consequence, from Ypres to the
border of the Disc above Noyon, more
than 100 miles, in longitude and from
dozen to fifty miles in latitude, there
exists the most appalling desert of
which the mind can conceive. A few
German prisoners cleaning debris
from the more important highways, a
few British soldiers standing guard
over material, and for the sort in
land, where 100000 of French and
Belgians lived five years ago, just
nothing. Villages, forests, the fruit
trees and the garden shrubs, like the
buildings, all gone.
The Punishment.
How, then, are the peacemakers at
Paris to set in motion the machinery
itself, all to be made. that will bring
the old inhabitants back to the Ger
man desert, which, like the great
American desert of the last century,
separates two smiling regions? How
are the millions of little people with
their flocks and their farm imple-
ments, to be returned? How are the
Germans who did this thing to undo
it?
And all this was not the wreck Of
battles. It was nothing Of the sort
In January, 1917, Hindenburg had said,
1--WE shall retreat twenty miles, vast
ing the country to create desert in
front of us, thus We shall escape an
allied attack, while we settle with Rus
sia," and with German thoroughness
the thing was done. The people were
marched off to Belgium to be fed by
American relief missions or to die.
The villages were destroyed, the roads
mined, every living thing was cur
down, every inanimate thing was
blown up So the German desert was
created, and so it remains now sown
with millions of unexploded shells, the
debris of recent battles, with helmets
and hand-grenades, region where
every heap Of ruins is deadly peril,
where the plow must reopen burrows
among live shells.
Somehow the German who created
the desert deliberately, wantonly, vici-
ously, must be made to abolish it, to
excavate the shells, to supply the lab
or and the material to furnish the new
homes with what they stole from the
old before they wrecked them, to re-
turn the machinery which they carted
to Germany. to supply beginning for
they took everything movable. and de-
stroyed everything that was immovable. |
Destruction in Lens.
There is still another problem. You
will find it at Lens if you follow in the !
footsteps of the Canadians over Vimy
ridge to the fiat lands below. Here
were the coal mines of France sur
rounded by score of little cities, with |
their well ordered brick homes, cities |
of which Lens was only the most con-
siderable. A hundred thousand people |
lived in these cities in comfort that |
was unmistakable, and year by year |
brought up from the ground about |
100000 tons of coal, the greater |
share of the French supply, and the |
very foundation of French industry |
And of all these little cities are left |
only vast heaps of beams and smash
ed bricks. Mile on mile in all direc-
tions not house stands. Into the |
mines the Germans turned the floods. i
Such machinery as they could not re-
move they smashed. Each house was |
treated to dynamite.
hope my American friends will |
thing of the German desert, which &C.
cupies so much OF northern France
when the peace conference begins it's ,
work. II the French ask the posses
sion OF the Saar coal district, once |
theirs, and stolen by the Germans in |
1914, to replace the ruined coal fields |
Of Artois and Flanders, l. trust that |
the Americans will not see in this .
demand French imperialism. but the i
effort of France to resume the bust /,
ness of life despite the German ef- |
fort permanently to destroy French
industries.
And in the Paris conference there
Is to be talk of the responsibility not