BRITISH WAR VETERANS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 May 1939, Page 9

BRITISH WAR VETERANS

COMMEMORATIVE CEREMONIES IN FRANCE. Two thousand British ex-soldiers are expected in Paris in the first days of August to join in commemorative ceremonies of August 2 and 4, 1914. Paris intends to give them a rousing welcome, and special entertainment will be provided. They will find Paris gayer and brighter than they used to find it when in the capital for short leave, at a time when lights at night were few and dimmed. There were two important depots of the Army Ordinance Corps in Paris and on the outskirts. One was at javel, not far from the Eiffel Tower, close to the Seine, and the other was at Pantin, just north of Paris. Here the British soldiers, for the most part engaged on repairing rubber trench bools, were housed in a disused tram yard, and for some years afterwards one of the trams which they had converted into sleeping quarters was kept just as they had left it. At the factory at Pantin and at Javel a number of French women were employed, and the forewomen wore stripes on their arms to distinguish them from the others, and as the stripes were three in number it is still common to meet portly matrons who tell with pride how in the last war

they were sergeants in the British army. A number of men returned to France after the war and married French girls. One among them. Charles Higginson, who blows the silver Anzac bugle four times a year, lives with his French wife in the very village of Contay, where he was billeted.