GENERAL WAR NEWS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1770, 29 December 1917, Page 1

GENERAL WAR NEWS.

SPEEDY SHIPS IN QUICK TIME. The United States is making wonderful progress in building destroyers, Before the war the shortest time in which a torpedo-boat could be bulit was 22 months; now (says the Morning Post) they are being turned out in eight months, and Congress has given the Navy Department all the money if can use for building these vessels. While certain that the submarine will be eventually rendered powerless, naval officers insist that there must be no cessation of mercantile shipping construction to compensate for losses already incurred, and, while the navy is pushing the building of destroyers, the Shipping Board is employing all the yards and men it can secure to turn out cargo-carri-ers. COLD BY DIVINING ROD. As persuasion and threats no longer induce German patriots to give up their hoarded gold to the Imperial Bank —whose reserve has remained practically stationary at £120,000,000 for the past year — Professor ()lpp,of Tubingen University, suggests hunting for hidden gold with the divining-rod. He liases his proposal on experiments just carried out by German scientists. It had been found possible, he said in a lecture, to detect with the divin-ing-rod whether a person had paper or metal money on his person, and in exactly what pocket or other part of his attire it was concealed. In an article in the well-known Munich Medical Weekly, Professor Olpp expresses the belief that the divining-rod, like the X-ray, is capable even of revealing the presence of metal money secreted in the body. CONDITIONS IN RUSSIA. I met lately (says a writer in the Pall Mall Gazette) an English lady who has just succeeded in reaching this country from Russia. She was present during the whole of the revolution, and the description she gave me of conditions in Russia throws a new light on the present situation. London, with its little sugar and grocery queues, knows nothing whatever about war, I was assured. In Petrograd the housewives wait all night long on the snow-covered pavements in order to get their meat in the morning. Passports have to be produced when one wishes to buy a loaf of bread. At a time when boots are advertised to be sold people wait outside the shops for days, and then often discover that only small sizes are to be had. COOL-HEADED AND GALLANT. The difficulties of the ammunition carriers is thus described by Philip Gibbs: —More rifle ammunition was wanted as the time passed, and the carriers took frightful risks to bring it. The drums of the battalion did well as carriers and stretcher-bearers, passing up and down through the barrage fire, and there was a private who guided a party with small arms ammunition —IO,OOO rounds of it —to the forward troops, with big shells bursting over the ground. Twice he was buried by shell bursts, which flung the earth over him, but on his way back he helped to carry a wounded man 800 yards to the regimental aid post under hot fire. He was a coolheaded and gallant-hearted fellow, and went up again as a volunteer to the forward positions, and on the same night crawled out on a patrol with a young lieutenant to reconnoitre a position on the left which was still in German hands. AIR RAID SHELTERS. King George and Queen Mary, accompanied by Princess Mary and Prince Albert, recently toured the east end of London and inspected the air raid shelters provided in that section where thousands of poor families live. The fact that the Germans apparently have no definite objective and drop bombs promiscuously has resulted in all possible precautions, such as the placarding of every available shelter, improving the system of hostilities warnings, and increasing the defences so that the German airmen may get an unhealthy reception if they should by chance break through. NEW USE FOR WOMEN’S HAIR. The Cologne Gazette’s Frankfort correspondent states that four daughters of distinguished parents have offered their hair on the altar of the Fatherland. A hairdresser's high offer to purchase their hair was refused, as it is to be devoted to purely patriotic purposes, namely, for driving straps for submarines. This confirms the statement that women’s hair was being used to make straps .for driving machinery.

FIRST TIME IN HISTORY. The commission that will take the vote of citizens of New York State now in the army and navy in Europe has arrived in London, and will begin immediately establishing headquarters for the distribution of ballots. This is the first time in history that an attempt has been made to take the vote of men outside the country’s territorial limits. A FIVER A WEEK FOR ALL. Mr Tom Mann, in a letter to Mr W. A. Appleton, in support of Lord Leverhulmo’s proposal for a six hours day, suggests that immediately on the close of the war the workers should establish a working week of 30 hours—six hours a day for live days a week, and two Sundays for everybody. “To advocate an eight hours day now,” says Mr Mann, “is to be hopelessly in the rear of industilal. and social requirements, My programme is five days a week, six hour* a day, and 20s a day for every day worked. ——— / ” ANOTHER RED CROSS TRICK. Only once did they play a bad (rick, writes Philip Gibbs, in describing the Flanders advance at the end of September. Under the Red Cross Hag some stretcherbearers went into a pill-box which had been abandoned, and shortly after machine-gun tire came from it. That is the kind of thing which makes men see red. A TRUE-BORN ENGLISHMAN. Modern conditions would have materially enlarged the ideas with which Daniel Defoe wrote his histon'c ballad. We cherish an amusing picture from the days before the war of a depot sergeant who indignantly exclaimed to a trembling recruit of undoubted Semitic profile, who had received Highlanders born in Whitechapel and elsewhere, but regarded one from Jerusalem as the limit. The Rev. L. Maclean Watts, C.E., however, says in Chambers’ Journal: —“Perhaps the weirdest of all the strange mixtures whom I met at the front was a young fellow at a mechanical transport camp. His father was a Russian Jew, his mother being English, his grandfather Dutch, and he himself was born in London and brought up in Glasgow, In a world of such widely inter-national disturbance you almost expected him to go oil into effervescence like a seidlitz powder. SPIES IN A SHELL-HOLE. German planes came flying over our troops to get their line, flying very low, so that their wings were not n tree’s height above the shell craters, and our boys lay doggo not to give themselves away, says the Daily Chronicle correspondent. Some of the hostile planes were redbellied, and others -who came searching the ground were big, por-poise-like planes. They dropped signal lights and directed the fire of the 5.9’5. A private, lying low but watchful, saw a light rise from the ground as one of these machines came over, and it was answered from the aeroplane. “That’s queer,” he thought, “dirty work in that shell-hole.” He crept out to the shell-hole from which the signal had come, and found three German soldiers there with rockets. They tried to kill him, but it was they who died, and our man brought back their rifles and kit as souvenirs. GUYNEMER’S AVENGER. Details of the aerial engagement in which the death of Captain Guynemer was avenged by one of his comrades shows that on September 30th Lieutenant Fonck was flying at a height of 7,000 ft., when he was attacked by a German twoseater piloted by Wissemann, the German who shot down Guynemer. Fonck escaped the first rush by clever manoeuvring, got behind the German machine, and opened lire from below. Wissemann was shot through the head, fell out of the aeroplane, and dropped to the ground. The observer was also killed. Fonck is' officially credited with 15 victims, five of whom were shot down in six days.

REASON ENTHRONED.

Because meats are so tasty they are consumed in great excess. This leads to stomach troubles, biliousness and constipation. Revise your diet, let reason and not a pampered appetite control, then take a few doses of Chamberlain’s Tablets, and you will soon be well again. For sale everywhere.—Advt. Wanted: Housewives to realise that it pays to purchase groceries and household requisites at Walker and Furrie’s. ...