INTERESTING NEWS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 13, 17 January 1916, Page 2

INTERESTING NEWS.

AUSTRALIANS’ FIRST SNOW. Wounded Australian soldiers in the Cedar Lawn Hospital, Hampstead Heath, London, wer e delighted to see real snow for the first time in their lives, says Lloyd’s Weekly. "Wo have read about it in Dickons, of course,” said one, "and it’s a wonderful sight when it’s new to you. Our snowball fight to-day was the best adventure w r e have had since we enlisted.” Tbe good-humoured snowbal? fight was between the Australians and a party of British soldiers, and tne Australians claimed to have won.

"DEVILS TO FIGHT.” The description of the Australian and New Zealand contingents in Gallipoli by Sir lan Hamilton as being "not ordinary men, but devils ro fight,” is thoroughly justified, and Mr W. Douglas Newton tells a moving story of their exploits in the October issue of T.P.’s Journal of Great Deeds: —"They arc hot-blooded, headstrong, wonderful and elteetric fighters in a condition of war given over nlmost entirely to the frigid calculations of military mathematicians, and the coldly deliberate slaughtering, of profound and complex military machinery. They have brought back to battles the vivid and stirring passion of close and intimate, fighting. They have flung into their engagement* with a warm and reckless valour that has overawed and defeated cold science. They are anachronisms in the modern zones of warfare, for they are the newest of races making use of the oldest methods in war.” —Weekly Scotsman.

SLOW DOOM OF RHEIMS. "More awful than the destruction of small villages is the slow doom oi Eheims, writes Mr. Phi’ip Gibbs in the London Chronicle. ‘'A few days ago I stood on the edge of a great battlefield in Champagne, and from an eyrie in a tree above the valley looked across to the Cathedral, that shrine of history where the bones of kings Le, and where every stone speaks n>saints and heroes and a thousand years of worship.

"The German guns were still firingaround it. and its great walls stoo.grim and battered in a wrack or smoke. For nearly nine months thcity of Eheims has suffered thowoum.s of war. Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary shells, and monstrus Gnavmites’ have fallen within its boundaries week by week, sometimes only one or two on an idle day, somtimes in a raging storm of fire, but always kitring a few more people, always shattering another house or two, alwaysspoiling another bit of sculptured beauty. ’ ’