The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1920-08-31
E. H. DILLON DESCRIBES
DEVASTATED FRANCE
Merchant Visits Rheims and Other War Areas
While on Business Trip Abroad.

ef seflle twenty-five years preV1-
Gus to the war e. II. Dillon, who is
engaged in the millinery business at
1906 Main street, made an annual
trip to Paris to buy goods and STYLES.
war conditions for four years pres
vented his going AGAIN until this sunni
mef, He has just returned from a
/ trip on which he was Hix days going
and six and a half days coming back
and spent eight days In France. Dill
Ion sees great differences In France
since be. was last there and was very
much =--Apresned with the desolation
in portions OF the war area which he
visited,
In speaking of the ruins of Rheims,
Imagine" said he to a Times man.
"a city almost az large az Bridgeport
In which there were only seven hous-
es which were unchanged. Before
the war Rheims had population OF
something like $4,000. There are
now in the city trying to live amongst
the ruins about 10000. There are 20
houses for them simply ruins, ruins,
ruins everywhere. The people are
packed away In cellars, In single
rooms, and any sort of shelter they
can find. When the K. of c. left
there they turned over for the use
of the French people whatever they
had in the way Of buildings but of
course they were wholly inadequate
to supply the demand"
The cleaning up of the city and
the building of new houses is proceed
ing slowly or at a standstill for there
are neither men or money to do 1t
with. AS you make your way along
the streets 1t is one succession of ruin
ed walls with empty window holes.
heaps of rubbish, and lanen build
ings. In the yards and amongst the
rubbish and in the cracks of the walls
grass Is growing"
what the effect of these conditions
on the health of these people hiding
away like animals is you can judge
for yourselves. The factories are just
heaps of junk with the twisted beams
sticking from the mass of bricks and
machinery. The French Government
has arranged to advance twenty five
per cent of the cost of rebuilding fac
tories but not much of it has been
done as yet"
+ Missey-sur-Aisne, and Conde-sur-
Aisne, the fields were just a waste
of shell holes, not cultivated. You
can ride for miles and miles and not
see a horse or a COW, a pig or a
chicken. There are neither the peo-
PIE to rehabilitate the region
"At Vailly we had dinner at a no.
tel around which, or in the neigh
borhood of which, there had been
much fighting and they showed us
where the Germans had runneled all
the way from a nearby hill into the
hotel In this tunnel they built a.
sort of escalator on which they could
lay men and move them up down
the incline. They had used the hotel
for dressing station sending the in
jured men down to it, and if they
were only slightly injured they were
sent back to the firing line the same
way.
'I also visited Airy, where L saw a
ruined church, Jouy, Chavonne, Sou
pir, and Oeuilly. 1t was the same
everywhere. Miles and miles of de-
pressing desolation. There were
miles of barbed wire rusting on the
stakes where it had been used for en-
tanglements, and quantities of it in
the roll piled up anC spelling in the
weather."
eat Berry-au-Bac saw the famous
Hill 108 which was mined by the
Germans and 0,000 F'renchman
blown up at one time. There are
two great depressions in the white
chalky soil. Our guide was in the ex-
plosion and he told us his story, how
he landed away across the field in a
brook and would have been drowned
IL it had not been for a companion
who kept his head out OF water for
eighteen hours until the two of them
were rescued. He had lost all sense
of feeling and it was days and days
before it came back. Unknown to
him the doctors kept pricking him
with needles to see if his feeling was
returning but with no results until
one day he suddenly cried out for
Gods sake stop that, something is
pricking me-"
I'VE also went out on the Chemin
des Danes Ladies Road.) The road
itself has been repaired, it was not
destroyed as much some of them
were for it was well built and dates
back to the time of the Romans, but
on either side of it was a vast
stretch of shell holes, old trenches
and bits of war wreckage. There
were parts of shells and even whole
shells still 70 be seen. Our party was
carefully warned not to touch any
thing of the kind which we saw and
told of case where disregard of the
warning had been followed by an eX-
plosion and one man had lost an arm
and three others sent to the hospital.
We also saw circular shelters which
had been built for German officers
out of corrugated IRON
AT Pinon we saw the wreck of
what was once a magnificent forest,
now nothing but a tangled mass of
stumps and debris. The people in
that section have hard work to exist
as in fact they do in all parts of
the war area. OF course this is not
so in other parts of France especially
in the south which is prosperous and
is well supplied with horses and cat
tie although food is high
Asked about conditions in Paris,
Dillon said, almost every other wom-
an you meet in Paris is in mourn
ing but you could hardly expect less
in a country which has just lost a
million and half of men. There is a
sort of superficial gaity but it is not
as it used to be and it is in a meas
ure kept up for the tourists and of
course the pleasure palaces are kept
open for Paris wants to hold on to
her tourist business. At the lunch
hour you see men and women coming
from the bake shops with little pack
a1oS Of black for thev still