FRANCE’S DETERMINATION.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 218, 21 October 1916, Page 3

FRANCE’S DETERMINATION.

Yet one more speech has been delivered, calculated to impress Allies, neutrals, and belligerents, with France’s firm resolve to entertain no peace proposals which do not inducte the crushing of Germany. This was the French Prime Minister’s latest allocution, pronounced with splendid patriotic and intensely dramatic verve at a luncheon given in honour of the Russian Parliamentarians at present in Paris. “Germany lives in a staff of anguish, anxiety, and remorse,” were M. Briand’s most pregnant words. “The truth of idealism is at hand. It is the beginning or the end. Germany, which employs forces when she believes herself strong, and cunning when she feels herself weakening, is now reduced to ruses. She is circulating the bewitching word 1 peace B'ut France will have none of it,” exclaimed M. Briand amid great scenes of enthusiasm. “Peace can only be born of victory—victory of the Allies.” Although we have heard these sentiments expressed so often, in varying, styles, they still afford comfort and solace.

DROLL TAX PROPOSED. Unfortunate spinsters; Wretched bachelors! Another pit is being dug for your feet. The metaphor is perhaps rather daring, as the feet are not really in danger. It is the stomachs of our incorrigible celibates that are threatened. For the “Matin” announces that, with the object of procuring additional funds for the war relief organisations of the Hotel do Ville, Paris municipal authorities are considering the idea of putting a 5 per cent, tax on meals costing more than 5 francs and eaten alone in restaurants. Why it should be so reprehensible to breakfast or dine alone, and virtuous to dine or breakfast in company, is not very obvious. The contrary would seem more logical? The municipal authorities are apparently not moralists, and they- are not good economists. To shirk a tax is human, and no tax is likely to be a great revenue producer when payment of it may be avoided by the simple device of scrap ing acquaintance with, and dining at the same table as, another fellow-un-fortunate in a restaurant, or by the even simpler device of eating little, and keeping the bill below high-water mark —5 francs. The chief results of the tax seem likely to be more sociability and greater economy. HOW BATTLEFIELDS LOOK. “How does the ground look about ’Verdun?” I asked a returned memben of the “Iron Divsion” which held the German on the Haudromont ridge. “It looks like the moon,” he answered. “I do no mean that it looks shiny and bright like that (we were cnossing the Place dc la Concorde at sunset and a full moon was rising over the Toilerries); but you have seen photographs in the physical geography books of the face of the moon taken during an eclipse. They show a mass full of pits, something like a petrified sponge. The ground about Verdun is just like that ’ —full of shell-holes and pits. Do you realise,” he went on, “that some of those shells make holes big enough to hold entire omnibuses? I have seen a van load of straw, drawn by six horses, fall into one of those pits and disappear—horses and all The ground must be litenally salted with metal, judging by the number of trainloads of shells that have been scattered. But one docs not see much metal lying about on the surface. It is all buried in the ground. As for trees and shrubs, there is nothing but splinters left. The Bois do Caillctte, near Douaumont, has been rechristened the 'Bois de Allumetes’ by the soldiers, and it is a good title. There is nothing but matchwood left. During the early part of the battle the shell-holes filled with water As the soldiers had to move at night, stumbling along, dead tired, and loaded down under their sacks, they sometimes fell into those shell-holes and were drowned. They are very treacherous, those pits You find them in the most unlikely places.”