A labouring party travels through the muddy, cratered landscape of Flanders, Belgium, in January 1918. A member of the 5th (NZ) Light Railway Operating Company described the devastation around the abandoned city of Ypres (Ieper) in Chronicles of the NZEF, 30 January 1918:
We crawl around the outskirts of the shattered city, and its battered walls and empty streets look hopelessly desolate and forlorn in the light of the rising sun. Now and then a shell burst sends a fountain of bricks and dust into the air … The country here is a dreary desolation. It has been shelled until it resembles the scene of a recent volcanic eruption.
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