FRENCH RAILWAY TRAGEDY.

Auckland Star, Volume XLV, Issue 152, 27 June 1914, Page 17

FRENCH RAILWAY TRAGEDY.

SIGNALMAN MURDERED AT HIS POST iHIS WIFE'S BBAVESt. An extraordinary crime was committed at :: o'clock on the morning of May 14 on the Norrt Railway, when a signalman was shot and killed in his box a few hundred yards from the .station of Saint Denis, In the direction of I'ierrefltte. There are as yet no clues as to the motives of the crime or the identity of the murderer. On the previous night M. t'IySSC Poullin, known ns Le Pere Ulysse, for many years In the service of the Nor'l Railway Company, went as usual on duty In his signal-box at midnight. At (j o'clock he was to be relieved by his wife, v, b" lives wiih their grown-up sou in a linle cottage some ten yards away.

Ai 3 o'ciock Madame Poulain was awakened by tbe sound nf calls for help from tbe signal-box. She rau out and found her husband lying unconscious on tho itround, halfway between the box aud the cottage. He had bora shot through tbe head. A trail of blood bctweeu the bos and the place where ho lay showed that he was at his post when the bullet etruH: him, and hail attempted to drag himself to the cottage. Madame Poulain nwakened the iutuat.es of a neighbouring cottage, and with their aid carried her husband home. She then, with exemplary devotion to duty, took his place in the Bignal-box. At half-past 3 she signalled v Calais express to slop. Her husband was placed in a first-class compartment, and lakco to the (tare dv Nord, where he died .without recoveriug consciousness. Once more the heroic Madame Poulain wen; back to the signal-box. where her husband's ltfebloud still stained the boards. She remained ou duty till 0 o'clock, when relief came, aud bet- terrible vigil was at an end. Then, and not till then, did she feel herself at liberty to remember that tOte was a woman and a wife. Wheu she • reached her husband's bedside she found Ilint be had died an hour before.

Ou the floor of the signal-box has been Touud the bullet, which, after piercing the murdered ruau's head, rebounded from the wall It Is a bullet of the kind tired by the army revolver of the 1802 model. Footprints have been discovered in the vicinity of the signal-box, and the police have received informatiou that three suspicions persons were seen in the early hours of the moruing changin-j their clothes in a field not far from the scene of the crime. The theory of vengeance is that which the police are inclined provisionally to adopt. It is recalled that over two years ago Gamier, the motor bandit, and two of his friends cut the wires some fifty yards from the signal-box No. 11. in which Le Pere Ulysse met his death. Their intention was to provoke a railway accident and profit by it to rob the passengers of the wrecked train. Poulain discovered the plot and warned the police, nnd so frustrated it. Some time afterwards he received threatening letters. A second hypothesis is that some Anarchist shot the signalman in order to be able to work the signals and wreci a passing train.