THE NEW "BIRD-MEN"
WAR HAWKS AT THE FBONT.
Theso airmen are a new race of human beings (says a war correspondent, writing from the front in France). Five of the "super-avian" birds yesterday evening utterly distracted the Hun bat-' teries along our front. The air space:; above were spotted with shrapnel puffs, regularly, in tho proportion of.currents to a well-made "plum-duff" (I can think of no other better illustration), and back-and forth passed the hawks with tho most perfect and practical indifference. You hear tho muffled "plop" up aloft about eight seconds after you have seen the sparking flash of the bursting shell; you have even seen the graceful rounded curl of the shell-smoke form and change shape before you hear the "plop." When' the. batteries, are really busy you see flash upon Hash away up there, four and five together, and soon ; the flashes merge into a wild confusion of irregular "plops." The) hawks, if low down, and in great danger, dodge tho shells by continually shifting their angle of flight, darting about here and there, and it must need a cool head and hands and feet which work automatically up there. '
We have seeir flights ivhoreit seemed impossible for the hawk to miss a. shell, and then, when the hawk had reached safety, we have seen him .deliberately turn baok and return to tho same dan-, ger zone. It : .looks like bravado, but it is not. That hawk had not finished the task ho had set himself to finish, so ho went back. One hawk did this five times' while we watched from tho front trench, and when ho finally cided to go ! home to roost, and regained safety, it was a great relief to cheer him, and I hope lie. heard that bottledup explosion of relief wo gave him. In tho evenings, after sundown, by twilight, and against the sunset pinks and yellows, the hawks, from all points of the Hun front, come home to roost. Gliding in, with engines stopped, they swoop in long, gradual slants And when you Hiink what the.v have been through your thoughts break • down in a shamed confusion. It does not seem fair, in your ignorance, complete and dense, oven to think of their dangers. Talk about mastery of the . air 1 The air is like tho sea; in its unknown dangers which call for certain inborn qualities, and the master of tho one can be as easily master of the other. That.is just ray belief. At any rate, our birdmen treat the Hun bird-men witli as much, inborn superiority as our seamen do the Hun seamen. If -a German hawk ever passes over us, he is a hunted • and harried, unhappy thing, which very soon "scoots" for home and lagerland.,, You neyer see them at their easo and serene.
The Premier of New South Wales has received from the Agent-General an interesting account by Lady Paget, the wife of a former 'British Minister to Serbia, and administrator of the Serbian Relief Fund's First Unit of -.the tight against typhus at Uskub' during the first Austrian invasion, states the' Sydney "Sunday Times." "It is impossible," writes Lady Paget, "10 give any idea of the state. of the hospital and its surroundings when we first saw it. In all, the wards typhus cases were mixed 1 up with the-others, spreading infection right and left. But the stables where the Austrian prisoners were quartered were the greatest source of danger. These were lines of buildings long and airless, the smoke hvm the open furnace in one corner hanging always in the roof because there was no. vent for it. At the entrance .wo had to step through pools of filthy water which collected in the holes of tho mud floor, and all along the sides and down the middle' wretched figures in foul old uniforms were huddled together on dirty straw. Many were lying hidden under greatcoats, some shuddering, some quite still. 'As we lifted the coats to look under we found six dead bodies in a single building, and no one to carry them away. All fhe living were in a painful state of emaciation, those who had no real illness being faint with hunger, for ill the demoralisation wrought by the outbreak of typhus there was no one responsible for their regular feeding." Then describing the transformation, aftermany difficulties had been overcome, .Ve writer says:—"At the start, beforoany nursing was available, deaths took place at'the rate of from 20 to 30 a day. Shortly before wc left, when we • ad a full staff of three consecutive days not a singlo deatli occurred, although ve had over 500 patients. _ So surprising was this that the Serbian author* ties rang us up to ask why we had stopjjed sending in the daily return of deaths.'' Lady Paget remarks upon tho splondid unselfish work done by Austrian prisoners and tho good-fellowship existing between the prisoners and the Serbs.
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Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2654, 28 December 1915, Page 3
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824THE NEW "BIRD-MEN" Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2654, 28 December 1915, Page 3
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