GENERAL WAR NEWS

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVIII, Issue 68, 19 November 1915, Page 2

GENERAL WAR NEWS

[United Pbeb» -Association. j London, November 18. There is much speculation as to Mr Churchill’s future. He joins hi s regiment in France, with the rank oi major, to-morrow. Mr Asquith and Mr Bonar Law suggested to him U position on the General Staff, but he replied that he desired to tight in the ordinary, arduous, and dangerous way. Gold to the value of four million lire, a Treasury consignment, was lost l in the Ancona. I In the Commons, in committee on the Finance Bill, Mr McKenna moved ! a now clause to meet the case of gootts 1 which were manufactured in Britain, Isold to a non-resident, and thou reIsold to a retailor. There was a case j the Government did not wish to touch • it was that of an Australian merchant who sold wool to an English or French merchant in Loudon. Mr Gibbs, writing to the Daily Chronicle says: The battlefield at Artois was the most awful I have seen in tlie grim suggestiveness of war at its worst. The very earth is white with blotches of clay, and is pockmarked by innumerable shell-craters. It is now truly a dead ground. Everywhere are fragments of broken weopons and shells piled up like bottles ou a rubbish heap. Worse things lie about; fragments of human bodies and half-buried corpses. Poor tragic relics of mutilated men, they lie in waterpools clutching the mud, and one turns away cold from the bundles of rags and bones protruding from th© broken sandbags. Places that once were German shelters are now wrecked beyond description—a mass of chairs, broken mirrors, and shattered bones. This was the work of eleven hundred French guns and three hundred thousand shells, which were flung over the countryside before the infantry attack was made, and of the German guns which battered Notre Dame de Lorette since the days of the French victory and sacrifice. The village of Ablaiu is a ghastly place, and a hideous proof of the strife. Twisted iron is mingled with boots, helmets, furniture, and perambulators. In one German dug-out 1 found a splendid piano. When returning 1 saw a fearful sight of limping men with blood-stained bandages, and the stark figure of a French soldier being wheeled to a stretcher completed the picture of the awful horror and ruin of war.”