Evening star., 1939-09-20
GaIicia Has Few Scars
OF War, but Existence
Within Is inChaos
Tens of Thousands Have
Fled Homes in Terror;
There's Hunger, No Food
By WALLACE r. DEUEL.,

BY WALLACE II. DEUEL.,
CHICAGO Daily News Foreign Correspondent.
WITH THE GERMAN ARMY IN
GALICIA, Sept. 18 Delaye0 The
German forces which struck through
here to Lemberg and BreSt-Litovsk
and Bialystok and beyond advanced
so fast and met so little resistance
that they have left surprisingly lit
tie death and manning and destruc-
ton behind them. Perhaps for this
very reason through, the awful fact
OF war itself, apart from death and
manning and destruction, hangs all
the more blackly and horribly over
all Galicia.
Outwardly, Galicia is unbelievably
peaceful. 1t is sure that the long
columns of German trucks and guns
move steadily up along the dusty
roads to the fronts and ambulances
and empty trucks and prisoners
come back. A good many bridges
have been blown up. A certain
number of houses and stores and
public buildings have been de-
stroyed. The towns are choked
with refugees.
But considering the scale of oper-
ations which have taken place here,
there are amazingly few direct traces
of war. Almost all bridges already
have been rebuilt, the destroyed
buildings are few and isolated and
are far outnumbered by those which
are still intact. The casual visitor
would find it hard to believe that
war has passed this way.
Countryside Beautiful.
The Galician countryside is an ex-
traordinarily beautiful one of gently
rolling hills, the patient peasants
stopped at their work in the patch
work fields of green and brown, the
dun and dappled COWS cropping the
grass at the roadsides, whitewashed
timber, hewn farmhouses with
thickly thatched roofs nesting
among the trees, here and there a
handsome manor house in beauti-
fully kept park, the dark blue Be-
skiden Mountains shouldering up on
the southern horizon and overhead,
today, creamy white cumulus clouds
in the still blue heavens. This aft
ernoon it is raining somewhere far
off to the northeast and the arch
of rainbow springs up from earth
to sky.
But even here-and especially in
towns and cities-the dreadful i'm
pact of war is apparent beneath all
the outward peace. Even in towns
and cities there has been surpris-
ingly little death and destruction.
But here the crushing, suffocatlng
fact of war itself Is in the very air,
the more pervasive and the more
horrible for the very reason that it
Is divorced and detached from the
deafening, binding voices of the
guns and the direct, immediate
death and agony of the battlefelds.
Hunger and No Food.
Tens of thousands have fled from
their homes in terror. Families have
been scattered as though by hur-
ncane, brother torn from sister,
man from wife, father from son.
mother from child. Despairing, des-
titute, hungry and holloW-eyed, the
tens of thousands sleep in the for
ests or the fields or hidden in the
market places of the towns, beyond
tears, beyond despair, beyond hope
There is hunger and no food,
thirst and no water, sickness and
no medicine and no doctors.
The impact of war is shattering even
upon those who have stayed in their
homes or found their way back to
them. Water supplies In many
towns are inadequate or non-exist-
ent. There is not enough food. Gas
and electricity services function
badly or not at all. Banks are closed
and savings gone.
The Nazis are hard at work try
ing to bring order out of this chaos
and have already done something
toward making the towns livable
again. Bridges, roads and railway
lines are being repaired Refugees
are being helped back to their
homes. Loyal civil authority is be-
ing re-established. But there still is
an enormous amount to be done
and to be undone-and most of the
tragedy of war can never be made
good at all.
(Copyright. 1889. by Chicago Daily News
Inc.)