GLEANINGS

Horowhenua Chronicle, 5 February 1915, Page 4

GLEANINGS

SOMETHING OF A SHOOK

It certainly does come as a shock to see a typical little English house with half of one side ripped out of it ,with the frame of the first-floor : bay window hanging out over nothing at all, and its Venetian blinds and neat lace curtains ■waving distractedey in the wind. Or a solid, substantial fore-sqa>ure Georgian hause a little farther down the hill with its old time-blackened garden wall smashed, and broken-ofl stones of tho original creamy-white coloured lying around. Or a green English meadow like the one across which the youngsters ol Mr Ourrie's school scampered under fire pitted into shell-holes with great brown sods torn out and thrown for yards. Or the row of four scalped houses in Windsor-terrace lying down there apparently sheltered in the hollow with the great shoulder of the abbeycrowned East Cliff hiding them from the sea. Or an ordinary terrace with ihe windows of all but three of the twenty houses on one side boarded up —smashed by the concussion of the explosion that tore the whole of tho first floor out of neat little red-brick West Lea" opposite, where I picked up a great jagged chunk of a shell that s certainly an eleven inch! UNIVERSAL - SERVICE. Do not let ius pay any attention to the foolish prattle of those who talk of this war as the 'doom of conscription.. If the system of universal service has placed a powerful weapon "n the hands of the Kaiser and his advisers, and they have made a bad ue9 of it, we must also remember that a similar system has enabled Republican France to speak with her enemies in the gate, and the Czar of Russia to summon his 'hosts even from the borders ;>t Mongolia. It is true that the German 'nation in arms' founded for the noble purpose of freezing Prussia- from the yoke of Napoleon, has been grossly misused. But the remedy for that ; s not so much the destruction of a just and honourable institution, as the reform of the political system, of Prussia, and the tranference of more , ppwer to the Prussian people." Lord' Roberts. THE THROAT-CUTTING INCIDENT. Trooper F. "N". Trolove, writinj; to his pnrents at Christchurch. from Zeitun. under date December 12th. refers to tho incident, but declares ]t was an English Tommy, not n New Zealander. who pulled the vail off ■• woman's face and paid the pen pity wifcli his life. Trolove says: "The tro«i>'i . have all been warned not to sp«i!,any veiled women is allowed to •!■.. "her face. The other night in Cairo an English Tommy went up to one in n procession, and being a bit tipsy, he pulled her veil off for a joke. Tt was was a poor joke for him. for in tlie crush and confusion lie was collared from behind and his throat cut from car to ear. and he died in a few momenta.