Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 February 1919 — WIPING OUT ALL TRACES OF WAR [ARTICLE]

WIPING OUT ALL TRACES OF WAR

Thrifty French Already Cleaning Up Battle Ground to Plant Grain. TASK MOST DIFFICULT ONE Removing of Barbed Wire Entanglements Is No Easy Matter— Nar-row-Gauge Railways Being Torn Up and Trenches Filled In. Paris. —Eradication of all traces of the 52 months’ war has already begun everywhere along the old stationary front which marked the line of the opposing armies since the inception of a war of position. Barbed wire entanglements are being torn up, trenches are being filled in, camouflage is being taken down, narrow-gauge railways removed, and shell dumps and other depots for material being transported away. This is the. first time that any field fortifications have been permitted to be touched by the civilian population. Even after the Germans had been driven from the Chateau Thierry region south of the Marne to north of the Vesle, the military authorities refused to permit barbed wire to be taken up or earthworks filled in.

In most cases this work is being done by civilians, but everywhere with the release of the older classes of French soldiers and the numerous reformes —wounded discharged from the army—there are enough men familiar with field works to supervise the removal of them. Difficult Work. It is no easy matter for the novice to pull up barbed wire, and in places, -•paFtieularly— -4a --the--north of the Aisne, where the Thirtysecond division fought with General Mangin’s superb Tenth army and won for themselves the sobriquet of “The Tigers,” the entanglements cover hundreds of acres; the belts being hundreds of yards in depth. This wire dates back from September, 1914, and is rusty and dangerous to handle, owing to the presence of tetanus microbes. The newer “giant German wire,” the strands of which 'are a quarter of an inch thick and which bristle with barbs, is equally hard to remove. . The old wide trenches which were In vogue earlier in the war before the development of the minenwerfer as. an accurate piece of ordnance, are hard to fill in, as their parapets have been washed away by rains and blasted to bits of shellfire. They are like great ditches, furrowing the earth in every direction. The newer, narrower trenches, shored with timber and provided with duckboard floors are easier to fill in. The thrifty French first pull out the shoring and let the rain act on the trenches for a couple of weeks in which time they invariably fall in, then they shovel over the top, smoothing it off. No attempts are made to fill in the dugouts, the entrances merely being boarded up and covered over. Tn many of these German dugouts there are infernal machines and man traps likely to explode when the first person enters. Loose boards on the stairs or bits of string stretched. across the entrance set off explosives. Ln many other dfigouts there are corpses of friends or foes, killed underground by bombs hurled down the exits. All roads in the zone, -where the opposing armies have swayed back and forth are lined with fox holes, as the American doughboys call tb° tiny shelter caves they are taught to dig with bayonets and mess kits and which provide such wonderful shelter ■’against shrapnel. Everywhere in the belt of terrain marking the extreme limits of the passage of the fighting troops there are endless rows of these Xox boles dug Into the ditches beside

the roads. They tell the silent tales of bodies of troops on the march spied out by enemy airplanes or captive balloons and caught under concentrated Are by many batteries. Then the men are ordered to take cover, and si nee there is none to take they must improvise their own shelter. It is a remarkable sight to see how fast a soldier can dig a cave that will shelter his body with no implements but a bayonet and mess kit. They loosen the earth with the bayonet and scoop it out with the big, long-handled tin cup, sometimes working with the skillet in the other hand. Only light, Decauville railways are being taken up, all standard gauge lines which have been laid since the war remaining in position until such time as the administration determines what shall be done with them. Fe\v pieces of artillery remain in their emplacements, nearly all of those which were overlooked in capture durteg attacks having been dragged out

of their pits and placed in the public square of the nearest French town or village. But there are still hundreds of thousands of live shells, hand grenades and millions of rounds of small arms ammunition lying about everywhere. The earth is pitted with holes made by “duds” which may explode the first time the farmer’s plow strikes against them. Despite that, however, the thrifty French are cleaning up their country, preparing for the sowing of crops next spring.-- ———