Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1919-01-26
By FRANK H. SIMONDS.
Cablegrnm to The sunday Star.
PARIS. January "a. 1s1

PARIS. January "a, 1919
"HRoUGH the courtesy of the
British government l nave
como to the peace conference
by way of the war zone. TO
travel directly from America, always
ut peace, to Paris. now resum1nS
much of her antewar activity and
become again a real capital is to for
get almost entirely the four years and
a 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 otherwise if one journeys by
Ypres. by Nimy Ridge. by the Somme
battlefields, by the regions where hfe
years ago hundreds of thousands OIL
people lived and labored amid smlhng
fields and in pleasant towns-regions IN
which two million dead now sleep. and
sleep in the midst of a desoiation beyond
human words to describe
Places to Get Real Estimates.
have seen battlefields in the hour
of conflict, but in that time amid
the desolation and destruction there
was still a sense of human energy
which had become almost superhuman
in it's fury. The forces of destruction
were themselves vital amid all tne
waste which they created, out lar
more terrifying and terrible Is the
battlefield when the living are gone,
when upon hundreds and thousands
~ square miles of territory there
rests the blight Of war.
1t is in the dead cities, and even
more in the dead villages of northern
France, that one must seek evidence
must seek some estimate of that vast
account which remains to be settled.
The German has gone. He has van
ished out Of the trenches, out OF the
ruins of the region he has wasted
His conquerors have gone after him,
hut the real inhabitants have not
yet begun to return. AS conse.
0uence, from Ypres to the border OF
the Disc above Noyon, more than
hundred 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 high
ways. a few British soldiers standing
guard over material. and for the rest
n
and Belgians lived i've years ago. just
nothing. Villages. forests, the fruit
trees and the garden shrubs, like the
buildings, all gone. How. then. are
the peacemakers at Paris to set in
motion the machinery. itself all to be
made, which will bring the old inhabi-
teuts back to the German desert
which, like the great American desert
of the last century. separates Two
smiling regions? How are the millions
their farm implements to be returned?
How are the Germans, who did this
thing. to undo it?
Gives Different Point Of View.
1 In Paris one talks of the league Of
nations and the right Of self-deter-
mination, But on the Hindenburg line
ono thinks Of something more specific,
moro tangible. On the Hindenburg
line found q French woman who had
come to look for the first time at what
which she had been born, and her
people time out of mind: I found her
exhausted beside the road. after the
thirty-mile walk. her face again
turned toward her place OF exile. And
this is what for her. for her children,
her friends and neighbors the linden
burg line was.
nv readers win recall how often
have written of this great system OF de-
Tense, stretching from the Scarpe to the
Summe: they will have visualized it as
. fertilization, as system OF intricate
13eld works, with forts. In a certain
sense this was exact, in another 1t was
totally false. Here is what this French
woman found in the very heart of the
Hindenburg line facing Queant: Where
the famous switch line began. facing
sBhIlecourt, where once the Australians
were slaughtered, surrounded on all
sides by places whose names were in all
the war news a few months ago. imme-
diately before her was her own village
OF IL there remained a few masses
Of riven masonry. endless heaps of brick
and dust, formless masses OF ruins,
themselves half buried in ashes. Where
the village church had stood squat
German dugout arose in stark ugliness.
the single existing structure that had
form. Looking north, east, south or
west from the gentle eminence on which
the village stood, she looked out upon a
land torn by shell fire until it resem-
bled a skeleton rather than the flesh.
Along every swell in the slopes actually
behind 1t, crumbling dugouts, ugly holes
in the ground slowly sinking under the
action of the rains. separated from each
other by endless rows of barbed wire,
sown everywhere with little crosses,
themselves half fallen. where dead men
were buried at hazard.
Finds a Monotonous Waste.
yond the nearer view. curve on curve,
the land swelled away in all directions,
q monotonouS waste without a tree,
without single surviving habitation.
without any obstacle to interrupt the
vision-not a desert with clean sand,
but q waste in which everything spoke
Of decay following death. For nearly
twenty miles in either direction this
desert extended. Eastward against the
horizon was the skeleton of Bourbon
woods. where the first battle of Cam
brai was won and lost in 1917. West
ward was Arras. behind the slope, the
city of a thousand bombardments
gone now to dust and ashes in the
main. Here where there had beer
smiling villages, fertile fields and hap,
py people was nothing but a desolatior
tragic beyond expression.
And all this was not the wreck OF
battles. 1t was nothing of the sort
In January, 1917. Hindenburg had said
We shall retreat twenty miles, vast
ing the country to create a desert il
front Of US: thus we shall escape ar
allied attack, while we settle with
Russia" and with German thorough.
ness the thing was done. The people
were marched Off to Belgium to be fec
by American relief missions, or to die
The villages were destroyed, the RODS
mined. everything was cut down. every
1nAntmate thing was blown up. So the
German desert was created, and so il re
mains. sown now with millions of un.
exploded shells. the debris of late bat
ties, with helmets and hand grenades
o region where every heap of ruins is
o deadly peril, where the plough mus
reopen burrows among live shells.
Held Duty to Come Back.