THE TERRIBLE REVENGE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVIII, Issue 66, 17 November 1915, Page 7

THE TERRIBLE REVENGE.

DEVILS OF THE DARDANELLES. NO MERCY FOR THE FOE. From all quarters news is filtering through that must fill the British public with grave uneasiness wrote A. G. Hales iu "John Bull" of September 11. The same story comes from land and sea, from East and West. It is an open secret that our foes have used, and will continue to use any and every kind of device that devilment can suggest, in order to achieve victory, whilst tho paper-legged party iu our midst insist upon our soldiers and sailors playing the game strictly in accordance with the rules. The "paper-legged party" is that section of wire pullers who made this war possible by refusing to prepare for it. They, more than anyone or anything else, brought us into this wallow of blood and death, and now, instead of trying to bring tho bloody game to a swift ending at as little cost to our brave fellows as possible, they are insisting on tho "kid-glove" game, and are whimpering about what posterity will say of us. Damn posterity, and damn the paper-legs also I What we want is a fight on fighting lines; the kid glove for the ball-room, but the bunched-up fist for the fray; and if wo don't alter our present tactics, and give our lads a fair and honest chanco, our death roll is going to grow to euormous proportions. They are hiding our maimed and crippled men away from the public gaze, these flabby weaklings; they do not want the public to know the real price the nation is paying from day to day, week to week, month to month. So the maimed heroes, the armless and the legless men, are hidden away in odd corners, lest the temper of the nation should be roused against the crew who will not let our men do to the Germans what the Germans are doing to them. How much longer is the British nation going to sit still, and permit this jellyfish breed to rule the roost? The nation needs a man with a hand or iron, a man who cares no more about posterity than that it shall record the fact that in 1916 the Germanic empire was crushed to cinders.

WHO IS CODDLING OUE FLEET. Our Navy was never manned as it is to-day; we never in all our history owned sailors and officers like those who man our ships; they are aching for a fight. "If th G fo e won't como out to us, why not let us go in after him?" they ask, and they are right; but the "paper-legs" say, "No, wo must save our ships," forgetting that jt is often cheaper to lofco a war-ship than to save one. This simple truth is that th e sloppy mouth and the flabby hand rule the destines of the war from our side, and have done so from the commencement. We are in the hands of tho great God of Gab, and the young lives wasted day by day are sacrificed on hia altar. What did we build our Navy for, if w e did not mean it to take chances? Our naval men are willing, more than willing; they are eager; they would have had that German fleet out of the Kiel canal long ere this, if they had been let alone. I know many of them, and know how they are smarting under the rule of the "paper-legs," and I am often asked how much longer tho British people will stand it. THE DEVILS OF THE DAHDANELLES. War is war, and war is hell; we can't make it anything else; thtmian who talks of Hague Convention rules in war-time is a dreamer. Heal war has no rules. Let us now wake up; the German has made all the Hell he knows; let us make it merry Hell for him. What would have happened at the Gallipoli peninsula if the Maoris and Australians had not got there, I do not know; these two peoples make

their own rules as they go along in a fight. No one more chivalrous than they if the enemy plays the game, but let him piny the Devil, and they find the brimstone to warm him, and they find it in lumps. Their motto is, "As my eneury does to me and my brother, so will I do unto him, and a bit over for luck." It's a "i c © c l° an motto for a real fighter-fair to nil, flattering to none. At the beginning they did not know the truth; then came a day when a bunch of Australians got cut off; they fought to the last cartridge, and were taken prisoners, and the Turk did to those game, grim lads the unnameable thing, mutilating them a s of old I had known them mutilate the Macedonians. It was a horror fashioned in hell, and shaped in shame, anl the victims were glad to die. A Maori regiment came across the dying Australians, and there and then swore a great oath never to.rest until justice had been done; and a STTiori never breaks an oath; all the orders? of the Army Council could not make them do so; they had B wom by the old time gods of their people, as a Maori always does when his fighting blood is on the boil. The mutilated men had been their bivouac comrades; they had broken bread together; that was enough. They passed the word to the Australian regiment, naming the shameful thing that had beon done, and a growl terrible as a storm ran along the Colonial lines. M.en gripped their rifles till the barrels almost bent; faces that had been young and boyish a moment before, set like stone.

THE TERRIBLE REVENGE. They spoke no word, they made no vow, but ever and anon, as they gazed at the Turkish trenches, where the German officers kept watch, a low, deep, menacing growl broke the stillness. So the Maori and his Australian cousins waited. Day was changing to dusk; an order ran along the quivering lines—the Australians lean-' ed a little more forward on the rifles, whore the bayonets were fixed, gleaming dully in the reddish haze of the departing day. The Maoris began to thump the earth with their heels in slow rhythmic measure; balancing on one foot, they hit the earth with the other; faster, faster, ever faster grew the throbbing sound of the old Maori war-march; it had come down to them through a thousand years; it was in their blood, the blood of a warrior breed who kuow no fear. The Australians, sphinx-like in their stillness, heard the throb of pounding feet, and never stirred; theirs is the white lire that never flickers, never grows cold, never burns out. Sudden and sharp an order ripped along the lines., Maoris and Australians leapt into life as though flung forward by an etec|tric shock; they ran as men run who 'are matched with death, right on towards the Turkish trenches. Never a sound from the Australian lines, but a yell that rang to heaven from the 1 Maoris, the battle-yell that New Zea-; land knew when the world was young. Guns spoke to them a s they strode over the ground in their splendid pride. Big guns and swift-lirers sang the song of death. Rifle* ripped the air. Iron and lead made a curtain of death all the way between thorn and the Turkish trenches, but they went on; the Maori and the Australian never falter in the charge. On to the trenches went all that was left of them, on and into the trenches. Then Turkish mutilators and Teuton officer learnt in that grim hour what real war is. They avenged the mutilated men., and sent a shudder through the Sultan's army. He who told me the tab was in the thick of it. "Why aren't you out there, old man?" he asked and I laughed in my soreness, "Yankees and others can go, but—l'm onl\ a damned Colonial!"