NEWS FROM ALL QUARTERS.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 4 January 1915, Page 3

NEWS FROM ALL QUARTERS.

! SAD SCENES IN A CINEMA 1 THEATRE. The Belgians lost 20,000 killed and wounded in defending the river Yser in the battle fon the coast. They held the line gallantly, but the preponderance of German artillery punished tlieni severely. There was verv tittle atoowmodation**!' at outset. i'-r i-lt'f-v' 'tlUUlhci' Ol v.-.i:iadfd which »ere ih'mi yl! Ih« iuui« iiii.i lt» ihe riciiu*y. .-ad wvr'i- i. uuessed ii; 'vii 'ii >.-■ '.'iiiy io;;; ho'iih j'.'urli'Oin Loudon. 'J'Jmu.saiioi' wound- >•<.' l,J(>lgiiiii.-. were suddenly deposited/ in Gaiuis, where no preparations had been made to receive them. •'Will you imagine," says Mr G. V. Williams, a wair correspondent: describing tho scene, ''the interior of a cinema, theatre, a tawdry place with the scats removed, but come sticks ol scenery r»maining, the <lirty boards covered with straw, oil which wo muled l men, batter**! blood-stained and'filthy, lie so close tluit to pass from one side of the room to another you must actually walk on the bruised bodies? Night and day the womiidfxl arrive in 'tatsp'ital trains, which puff slowly into the goods siding at Calais town station with screeching whistles, heralds of the convoy of pain. "Everything that loving care could do for these poor wounded men was done, but what do untrained volunteers, however Availing, know of antiseptic surgery or of the feeding -if the wounded? Oh the scones of horror witnessed in that sordid little cinema theatre, the heaps of soiled dressings, the naked men with gaping wounds waiting their turn on the rough deal table where the Belgian surgeons worked night and day. the pestilential ai-r. the dumb agony of the suffering.

"The eager viistsore that brought bread and solip to the wounded did not know-- how should they, all untrained

I as they were?—that hunks of hread are death to> a man with abdominal wounds. News of the condition at Calais was sent to London, and relief was almost instantaneous. . Within four days a party of British doctors and nurses and orderlies had a magnificent hospital in full swing in. Calais, and established a dealing hospital at the railway station. Eleven, thousand wounded Belgians passed through this hospital in ten days. THE "VATEIILAND." Says the "Bulletin" :—The problem of his refugee ships increases for the Deutscher. They have to pay for board and loading, of course, and Hans can't make up his mind whether to let them slide ox to keep on paying while they eat their heads off. The greatest of them is the'Vaterland, now in New York Harbour. Billed as the mightiest craft the world had ever seen it started out on its maiden trip two months before the war broke otit, dripping with champagne and flying the flag of Wilhelm 11., Admiral of the Atlantic. Now the Vaterland iias been arrested for debt by a London furniture shop. It transpired on the application to the N'ew York Court that all the furniture and decorations of this suposed triumph of the German dockyards had heen supplied and fitted by Britishers. Hans doesn't know what to do. Jellicoe won't allow him to go and fetch his ship, and he simply hates to pay, because if he does the loathsome Britishers will get the money, and iT doesn't do something quickly the Lord knows what will happen.