The Washington herald., 1919-02-04
by WINIFRED BLACK.

Paris. Feb. 3.-Wild flowers are in
bloom in Bclleau Wood again. Pink
and white and delicate blue, saw
them there today. They never have
bloomed so early in the spring or late
in the winter before the peasants say.
1t is usually March before Belleau
Wood is gay with noddinS flowers,
but now the poor. bobbed, crushed
and broken trees are garlaned with
the strange smoke-like wreath of the
clematis and prickly leaves OF the
holly are green and shiny and the
mistIetoe CLEANS white, like the ghost
of some dead flower.
1t is as if the whole forest were
draped in funeral flowers in honor of
the brave dead acleep in the broken
earth below.
II Many Americans Lie Here.
1t was in BelIeau Wood that the
American boys first rushed into the
open to chase Il fleeing foe, and many
of our blood lie buried at its edge.
1t is such a quiet. pretty little grove
of trees. The Place of the Americans,
as the peasants are beginning TO call
it, is just such a stretch of upland
lOlOSl dS We nave III d lllohohhu ~
tie pleasure parks at home.
We had such a grove in the out
skirts of the town where l was a lit
tie girl, just the place for picnics ana
swings and harmless merrymakings.
How strange to think of all that has
happened in Relleau Wood such lit
tie while ago.
7 1t is quite easy to see it all when
Al, Ill h lNvft,
trees that look as if some dreadful
cyclone had twisted and torn their
branches and stumps.
The valley spreads below like a
green and lovely vision; the plain
widens like a map, and through 1t
and winding to the surrounding hills
are the clean white roads of France.
The trenches our boys used are not
at all elaborate in Belleau Wood
they are Just little narrow. shallow
bitches such as you and 1 have play
ed in a thousand times at home:
muddy and half full of cloudy ditch
water and scooped out in the sides
here and there with special holes
where the machine guns nestled
Along these shallow bitches the
wild flowers blossom pink and blue,
and beside them and close to them,
I'D and down the hillside we stumbled
again and again upon a shallow grave
with a half buried hand or foot eX-
posed; these are Germans who stay
ed too long in Belleau Wood when the
Americans came through.
Helmets, "duds," cartridges, belts,
broken pipe, smashed canteen
and once a wrinkled. soaked photo
graph case of leather with a soaked
and unrecognizable photograph in
side it-all such things as these 1 saw
not once, but dozens of times in Bel
leau Wood today, where the lush
green grass springs already upon the
battlefields and tries its eager best
to hide the scars of war.
Peasants mt the PIoughing.
Down in the wide fields below the
slow white oxen drew the old
fashioned ploughs for the French
peasants, who already are beginning
to till their ravaged fields again,
and calm and smiling and at peace
the whole world seemed.
But, oh, below at the edge of the
wood, the rows and rows of graves
where our boys lie asleep in far
and foreign land! They look so
strange, these rows of graves, es-
pecially from a distance.
There is broad, squat, wooden
cross at the head of each grave. and
at the top OF the cross is round
disk which tells the name of the
man, his company and regiment, and
something in the shape of these
disks and in the proportions of the
old squat crosses makes them look
not like crosses, but like little