WHY THE HUNS SHOULD PAY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXIX, Issue 9476, 13 December 1918, Page 6

WHY THE HUNS SHOULD PAY.

CANADIAN SOLDIER'S REASONS

No one could call me bloodthirsty. I am the most peaceable of men... I am not vindictive, nad I think I may say that I seldom. harbour ill-feeling in my heart. But—.l loathe a Hun. "Why ?" I'll tell you. ' Outside a pretty little bungalow in a. tree-bordered street in Victoria, 8.C., hangs a red flag. There is a sale on. That was my home. People are inside there bargaining for our little, household treasures. Cautious 'housewives are! fingering carpets und curtains and appraising their value. A fat. old dealer is trying to convince his pal. that my priceless Sheffield plate soup tureen is not genuine. There is a man carrying, away my child's cot. I've no home now.. All the, little store of books'.! treasured so is gone. My wife is living in a boarding-house, and the" youngs-tor has no nursery now.

We've sold up. so th.it I may join the --tit. Battalion.

The Tlun must pay me for that— must make what reparation, can be made for breaking up' my home; for all the • heavy heartaches we had in parting, from our treasures.

I uul standing, in the British military cemetery at J3ailleul.. It. is : June, 1917. I have found what I sought. A simple mound with a. little plain wooden cross at the head of it. My younger brother lies there.

Five years ago he came out to British Columbia, to me—as fine a lad as you. could meet. He had just left school. A clean, wholesome product of an English public school., in 1914. ho left his job—surveying—and enlisted. He served eight months as a private in France, got a commission, and within four months,, his company. Two days before his 2.lsfc birthday —-in June, 1916—he was going round, the linc^ at "stand-to;" ' A sniper's bullet-hit him square in the forehead —tho next day they brought him here.

It was a. Hun's, hand that pulled that trigger. Do you suppose I'll meet a Hun again when peace comes, with the haunting, feeling that the hand I shook in greeting might be tho hand that pulled that trigger? They can't give back that young life—but they still have "eyes to weep with." Make them, weep! .

An old man is walking- slowly up and • dowfa the lawn- in the garden of a beautiful old Kentish vicarage. It is a still summer night. -Hardly a sound you would say. J3ut the old man stops and listens. He can just hear a distant rumble—far, far away to the south.

"The guns in Franco or Belgium," he would tell you. Day and night he is listening, listening for that distant rumbling. He is my father.. Four years ago 3 did not consider him on the border of. old age. But these years of sorrow and ever-present anxiety, first for two sons now for one only, have changed him. They have deepened the furrows in his cheeks, have turned his hair to silver,, taken, all the joy of life from his eyes. He is only one of millions.

Tho Huns cannot make the. old man young again, cannot, restore the boy they stole from him. But even their brutal instincts can be made to realise how all decent people loathe a murderer.

Make them feel it !