GENERAL WAR NEWS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1880, 21 September 1918, Page 4

GENERAL WAR NEWS.

THE TYRANNY OF HABIT

Sympathy was offered lu a man from the front .who would not reach his Yorkshire home till 11 the next morning' (a writer in the Daily Chronicle relates). “Nay, it doesn't worry me all that, doesn t the Journey ”he said. “1 shall do well enough in the train. The. trouble is, that when you've been roughing at the front you can't settle down fo a bed. I’ve slept on cobbles, I’ve slept in mud, in a shed, in a ditch, but when- I came home for my two Blighties, do you think I could get to sleep? No, 1 felt ‘fair smothered’ by the beds.” RATIONING OF JAM. The price of honey has gone up very rapidly in England during the past year or so, and to-day one pays never Jess than 2s (ill for a pound jar. If it is not controlled and rationed, the price is likely to soar still higher, for the fruit crop is foredoomed. In dozens of orchards one sees no fruit at all. Alveadv the Government is able to describe the fruit crop as.one of the worst ever experienced in the country. Not half the quantity of jam that was made last season can possibly be made this, and alter the army has received its demand there will be less than one ounce per head per week for the civil population, as against 4oz. in Ibld-17. TRENCH-MAKING IN THE DESERT. Mr W. T. Massey writes in his book, “Desert Campaigning''“To make a trench three feet wide you have to open some fifteen feet of ground, put in battens with canvas backs and anchor them, and then refill the space behind with the excavated soil. . . . When the Khamseen blew, as it always does at intervals from March to May, a whole series of trenches would be found completely tilled ‘up in a night, and the game of shovelling lord to begin afresh. Sometimes when the wind was carrying with it so much of the desert that the sun was hidden by the dust-clouds, the temperature went up to 115 and 120 degrees, one’s skin became hot, bps cracked, and the daily scanty allowance at water did not relieve parched throats fur .an. hour.”

A FIXED EASTER

The idea of a fixed Easier is gaining ground under the exigencies of war, which alone brought daylight saving from the visionary to the practical'. In England Easter utteu falls so near the end of the school term that it is not uncommon for the boys to go home for Easter within a week or so of the vacation. Lord Desborough, one of the mst compelling iorces in our eommeicial life, is insistent in drawing attention to the advantages which ho believes would accrue to the business world through (he adoption of a lixed dale for Easter. He point* out that we use for the fixing of our Easier the system originated centuries before the Christian era by the pagan Melon, who devised a scheme of over 5,000 lunations. The metonie system was effected by Calippus, and, with the further complication of the Golden Nuiubet and the Epaet, still decides for ns the dates of our Christian movable holidays and festivals throughout the year. ‘•YANK” OH “SAMMY.” Prom conversations with officers on General Biddle’s staff and other American officers, states a correspondent in an exchange, 1 gather that: they have a preference for “Yank” as a generic name for the American soldier. “Sammy” was one of the nicknames which never caught on, and had hardly the justification of our word “Tommy” as an abbreviation of Thomas Atkins. I suppose most people know Unit “Yankee” is said by some authorities to have originated in the corrupted pi-ounneiation of “Anglais” or “English” by the Red Lilians. Another statement is that the Dutch New Yorkers gave the nickname of “Yankin,” diminutive of John, to the English settlers in Connecticut. The name of Yankee seems to have been more expressly applied to the people of the New States, where the Anglo-Saxon element is strongest, and in the Civil War it was the term of derision used by the Confederates of the Northerners.