A YEAR AGO

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2532, 5 August 1915, Page 2

A YEAR AGO

_ Few, "if an)', of the women who listened to the announcement made by i His Excellency' the Governor exactly a year ago yesterday of the declaration of war by Great Britain against Germany throw for one instant their thoughts liito tlio future so far as to imagino that we would twelve months from that momentous day still bo fighting and still be far from the crucial point of success. Such a possibility was too stunning to contemplate, nor did they realise at the time how closely the war was going to touch them, what a test their courage and endurance wero to bo called upon to face. . . . . "England had declared war upofi Germany" were words fraught with possibilities and certainties too big to be grasped at the time, and even now tile kindest thing is sometimes to believe that they are not ' yet thoroughly grasped. Not yet are _ we like France, who has given without' counting, her men, her guns, her shells, her money, her credit, her all. The France of to-day has become a proverb, and she: is, 'according to an eminent Belgian publicist, M. L. Dumont Widen, a most amazing to the whole of the world. "She is, in sober ,tmtli," he declares in "Le Matin," the ,-very head and front, of the coalition, and her gigantic effort has been all tho more admirable inasmuch as beforo the war an outsider, even a friendly outsider, would have doubted her.'? Yet another surprise of the war has been tho part which has been played by women. Never before have their powera of- organisation; their resource, their all-round capacity for great, sustained, and widespread efforts been so magnincontly demonstrated as they have been in these countries so closely affected by the. war, and in New Zealand, too, they have done admirable work in regard to the comfort and care of the soldiers who have left New Zealand for the front and for various other forms of patriotic work. Beyond all estimation, however, has been thoir loosening of claims upon husband, brother, lover, and son, their refusal to in any way hold them from playing their part in this conflict of all the giant forces of tho world.

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