STORIES OF GENERAL PAU.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 8, 29 January 1915, Page 3 (Supplement)

STORIES OF GENERAL PAU.

Not the least dramatic episode of the present war is furnished by the fact that General Pau, who is next in rank to the Commander-in-Chief of the French army—General .Toffre— is fighting the Germans over the same ground as when he was a commander and lost an arm forty-four years ago. He was one of the heroes of the Fran-co-Prussian War, and it was in Lorraine that he retrieved some of the losses of the French; for his men, due partly to General Pau's strategy and their good fortune, were victorious in the campaign which saw the downfall of La Belle France.

In a letter just published in France, which was written to htn mother after the Battle of Woerth, in which the French suffered heavy losses, he tells how he was three times wounded, and it was necessary to amputate his hand. "I had, he says, "up to that time (tho Battle of Woerth) the luck not to be touched, in the midst of a rain of iron and lead, when a shell smashed a tree near me and a splinter struck me on the right hand and put two fingers liors do combat. An hour afterwards I regretted much less the loss of the above-mentioned digits, because a Bavarian bullet fractured the same hand and lodged itself between tho two hones of my wrist, from which I delicately extracted it. 1 was then ordered to the ambulance, and it was while I dragged myself along in that direction, obliged to pass under the fire of the Prussian batteries, that I received a fragment of shell in my right thigh. . . It is true that they had to take off my hand, but the operation was highly successful. . . In the meantime, a thousand kisses and hoping to see you soon."

It was a letter characteristic of the man who, since then, has been the military idol of France, and the affection with which he is regarded by his countrymen may be gathered from the fact that although he retired a short tnno agio, having reached the age of sixty-seven, he resumed active s<>rvice before the oubreak of the present war, as a result of the popular demand to reinstate him.