WAR ROMANCE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 207, 26 April 1932, Page 3

WAR ROMANCE

ANZAC'S SON AND LITTLE GIRL HE RESCUED MARRIED IN SYDNEY. EIFTEEN YEARS LATER. PARIS. Fourteen years after an Anzac soldier saved the life of a stray child in face of the ruthless German advance, there has. been a romantic sequel in the marriage of the girl to the only son of the man who saved her life. In the desperate fighting that followed the last great thrust of the Germans at the British' front, men of the Anzac Division, covering the retirement • of a badly maulsd British division found a four-year-old girl wandering along a shell-swept road, who had lost her parents in the confusion of the evacuation of the villages. Ronald Graham, an officer of one of the New Zealand units, took her under his personal care. She became regimental mascot until she was ultimately claimed by her parents. In the subsequent fighting Graham was killed, but after the Armistice the family of the girl, Yvonne Bertin, got into touch with the widow and orphan son of; Graham, who had then removed to Sydney, of which the mother was a native. The two families kept up an intermittent correspondence, and thei'e was an understanding that if circumstances made it possible for either to travel, the home of the other could be regarded as the common home for the sake of the dead hero. No opportunity of taking advantaige of this understanding arose until recently, when the widow and her son, now a lad out of his teens, came to Europe to visit the grave of the dead officer. Naturally they paid a visit to the Bertin family, who had gone baclc to the farm from which the little ghd strayed 16 years ago. Between the boy and the girl there sprang up a friendship, and now on the eve of the return to Australia of Mrs. Graham, the former wartima waif has been married to the son of the man who saved her from certain death on the shell-swept zone. Young Graham will take over the farm, which the Bertin family has settled on the girl as dowry. As the father of young Graham is buried on land attached to the farm, the young eouple will be ahle to loolc after his grave and pay meet tribute to his memory.