Paragould soliphone. (Paragould, Ark.) 1918-1950, 1922-03-13
Every Land Was DESTROYED
And Fields Lie AS They
Did When Peace Game
Little Village Life.
BY WEBB MILLER,

Omitted Press Staff Correspondent
Rheims, March 11-Utter, hopeless
desolation, mile after mile, hour aft
er hour!
Such is the lasting impression of
a drive across the battlefields OF the
Champagne and Argonne today
Like a vast brownish scar across
the Fertile r1e1us or FRANCE, these
battlefields still lie, scarcely touch
ed by human hands three years
after the last shot was fired.
Only in the towns and villages
are there many visible signs OF re-
vival. There the tenacious peasants
have flocked back and patched up
their shattered homes. They are
eking out a bare living. AS for tie
thousands whose homes were wiped
off the earth, nobody seems to know
what has become of them.
But it is in the wide stretches be-
tween the villages that the full hor-
ror of what happened here can still
be appreciated.
Throughout one whole forenoon
the United Press correspondent rode
across the desolate country from
Fort Pompelle to the center of the
Argonne, seeing few human beings
or signs of human habitants. As
far as the eye could reach lay desc
lation. The land looks as though
scourge had passed over. Here and
there the ridges show jagged out
lines against the sky entirely de-
nuded by terrific shellfire with only
a few shattered, dead stumps show
ing where once was a thick wood.
Along the line of the front for
miles the fields lie almost as they
did the last day of the war-still
a norman STAND, covered with scrag-
ely weeds interviewer with tangles
of rusty barbed wire. Shells have
turned up the chalky sub-soil and
only the hardest weeds grow.
On the low ridges where the she'll
fire was heaviest the soil is literally
dead-the churning by explosions
and repeated gassings have killed
the fertility so that nothing will
ever grow.
The old trench lines and dug-out
shelters have fallen in, but in many
places the old lines of barbed wire
acknowledgements, sometimes fifty yards
in width, still stand, choked by dry
weeds.
just beyond Fort Pompelle three
rusty direlict tanks used by the Ger
mans in an attack upon the Fort
lie in exactly the positions where
they were halted by French she'll
fire.
In this region the earth is literal
Nv criss-crossed with old trench sys-
TENS, and covered with the debris
of war. Only the barest start has
been made in reclamation, evidenced
by the piles of knotted barbed wire
stacked up alongside the road, Near
er Rheims gangs of men are work
ing to clear the ground of eXplo-
sives.
L
scene of some of the fiercest fight
ing of the war, is now merely a pile
of chalky hummOcks at the top OF
a hill dominating the surrounding
will find a mangled length of steeI
girder or the choked mouth of an
underground passage-the only in
dications that this chalk-heap was
ever fort. Sometimes the two-inct
thick steel is pierced with holes like
Kitchen collander. The base OF
the hill is interlaced with row after
row of barbed wire entanglements
The city of Rheims itself is 'com-
ing back To the casual observer
4 the task looks well-nigh hopeless
Out of $4,000 houses, 5000 were
utterly destroyed and the remaining
10000 more or less damaged. But
in the outskirts rows of hastily built
shacEs like a western mining towr
are housing thousands. of the formei
Inhabitants. Even the shops have
thrown up little wooden huts. Score.
OF the less damaged buildings have
been repaired and others completed!
rebuilt.
But in the, district around the ca
thcdral there are only heaps 0
dusty ruins. The cathedral is
pitiful skeleton of its former gran