The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1919-10-02

on many of the fronts of France, and
nature and the plowman have blotted
out many of the scars. The people
have come back to many of the wreck
ed village of other parts of France
and children play amid the wreck and
ruin while their parents patch up
shelled houses. But MOI so on the Meuse-
Argonne. No one has been so hardy
and so brave as to try to restore that
barren stretch. The trenches are
there yet, and the wire entangle-
ments, and the old dugouts, and the
spots of ground stained yellow by
hateful mustard gas. 1t is there as
war left it. No trees grow and no
flowers bloom. Stand atop Dead Mans
Hill and took as far as the eye can see
and there is nothing living. No human
being moves in sight The country
side has died and its resurrection is
not vet.
There is no scene so dismal Pic
ture if you can the view. Hill after
rolling hill stretch away in all direc-
tons from this highest of them all.
Innumerable brown traces of trenches
wiggle across them in a thousand
twists. Rows of tree stumps tell where
road once wound its way Rusty wire
in symmetrical lines runs in all direc-
tions. The one time fields are pitted as
| if by smallpox-like the face of
| man who had died of the disease. Mil
lions on millions of shells did that.
Down there in the valley is a sort of
white smudge. 1t was once the viii
lage of Malancourt. Its stones now
make the road | just came up. Here
and there sticks the head of a German
pillbox, more than one of them torn
by big shell which left the iron skel-
eton sticking up in rusty ugliness.
The debris of war lies about. Here
an abandoned wagon; there an old
overturned water-cart. There lies a
broken rifle; here a dented helmet
whose wearer paid the price.
Over atop another hill rise the ru-
ms of Mantfaucon, from which the
Crown Price watched his costly and
vain effort to take Verdun. 1t cost
many good American lives to drive
the Germans from this stronghold.
Every foot of the land is historic. Ev-
cry foot is filled with tragic stories.
Here a dugout has caved in and from
the ground sticks the thighbone, the
armbone and three crazy skeleton fin
gers of a disinterred soldier man. In
spots weeds grow-but not many.
Mostly the terraine unfolds brown
and barren and dead The impression
is the impression of death. 1t wasn't
the same feeling when one saw that
land filed with life, with soldiers 60
ing ahead and coming back. with con-
voys on all the miserable roads, with
the air filled with screaming shells
and airplanes. 1t seemed fitting
arena for the mighty struggle But
now they are all gone. Everything
that lived has gone. Everything is left
dead.
"Over to the west one sees the
wooded side of the Argonne and invol-
unfairly one listens for the rat-tat-tat
of the machine guns heard so often
in the dreary weeks it took the Am
orleans to clean out the Germans.
One wonders how goes it in the elab-
crate and fanciful dugouts built on
the northern slopes of those wooded
hills. What ghosts play in the old mo-
ton picture theratre over there north
of the Four de Paris. Is the yellow
old sheet hanging crafty from the
stage wire as it was twelve months
ago? Is the stream still bubbling
where members of the Lost Bat
talio' braved death to quench their
thirst? Is is still muddy over there :?
Thinking about that and almost
starting that way, one sees in the dis
tance the Stars and Stripes at the top
of white pole and remembers that is
the great American cemetery at Ro-
magne and one decides to go that way.
Up the road the Yankee engineers
built from ruined villages across what
for almost four years had been No
Mans Land. 1t is bumpy and full of
holes. No one has paid any atten-
ton to it since the Americans fin
ished using it. The chalky stone
makes it lie white and crooked in the
sunshine. Up towards Montfaucon,
past the old ammunition dump just
this side of the hill, where so many
traffic jams formed and where one
time American wounded lay for fifty
hours in trucks, while many died, |
shoot up on the hill where lies the
bones of the town. There on the north
side is the house which shielded the
entrance to the Crown Princes dug
ont and where the Bird Division once
| II. l..