OFFER OF ABYSSINIAN TROOPS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 42, 19 February 1916, Page 7

OFFER OF ABYSSINIAN TROOPS.

| Though the Germans managed to persuade the Senussi tribes to take up arms against us, the Allies are by no means without friends in Northern Africa, and in this connection a subject w r as opened up in the French Chamber of Deputies recently, of which we may be destined to hear a good deal in the coming months. According to M. Pierre Alype, a member of the Colonial Committee of tho Chamber, Lilj Jessau, the young Emperor of Abyssinia, is so favourably disposed toward the Entente Allies that he not only resisted efforts of German agents to induce him to abrogate treaties with Great Britain, Italy, and France, but offered 200,000 soldiers to be used by the Allies as their military necessities demanded. M. Alype made this assertion in connection with a resolution before the Foreign Affairs and Colonial Committees of the Chamber, offered by M. Gratien Candace, a Deputy from Guadaloupe, that the French Government, in accord with the Allies of France, seek immediately the means of obtaining the co-operation of Abyssinian troops under a guarantee of the independence of that country. With regard to this proposition it was recalled that the late King Monelek concluded a treaty of alliance with France in 1907. M. Alype pointed out that the French railroad connecting the French port of .Tibutil with Addis Abeba, in Abyssinia, would make possible the rapid transportation of troops to the coast, where, within four days, they could reach Suez, o t in five days Basra, In Mesopotamia. The Abyssinian troops, he also noted, were already well armed, having from 800,000 to 1,000,000 modern rifles, all manufactured since 1911, partly in Germany, but for the most part by Belgium. The co-operation of th e Japanese fleet was suggested for the transportation of Abyssinian troops to Egypt or Mesopotamia TIRED OF THE WAR Great stacks of dead men. Columns of onrushing men. Shots screaming out from a bulwark of corpses behind which th 0 living sheltered themselves. This was part of the gruesome picture

Albert E. Blair. 20-year-old adventurous ind, wrote Lome to his mother at Berkeley, California, begging that she -••'ml his American credentials to London so that ho might be freed from the horror of it nil. The shocked mother forwarded the desired papers so that the 'id. now suffering the torture of

bullet-wound in the knee, may come home from Europe’s inferno. "I’ve had enough of it,” he wrote, plaintively, "I wanted to see the war, but it’s too ghastly.”