MORE MEN AND SHELLS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 229, 25 September 1915, Page 17

MORE MEN AND SHELLS.

SIB J. FRENCH'S LETTER TO MB BE-> TILLETT.

"Oar nnprepi has cost us thousands of valuable lives, and I want to speak ' out for those men who are ready to give ' their lives. We ought not to lose them. |We at home ought to help them " i With these words Mr Hen Tillott adI dressed a Palladium audience on a recent j night on the lessons he had learnt during his sojourn at the front. He mentioned I that he had been under shell are and | within 400 yards of a formidable German trench, which was "nothing to the rtsk j the average Tommy had to take every day." Then he read the following letter from Field Marshal French, whose sister, Mrs Despard, was on the stage with him: — -Our Armies arc doing splendid work, and more men and more materials most be immediately forthcoming to back up the zeal and courage of our fighting forces. Our men in the field are looking to the nation to vigorously back them up. Energetic measures and concentration of nil our national resources to secure greater efficiency wfll lessen the loss of life by limiting the duration of the Tar.'' He bad been, Mr continued, among the men stricken down by the horrible gases the Germans were using. To the British public he would say—and he | was speaking from the men In the trenches that if, for any sentimental reason, they refused to use this weapon of gas, they j were not giving our men the chance they ought to have.

Mr Tlllett showed the audience evidence of Ihe devilish, fiendish hate the Germans entertained for our soldiers. In the form of clips containing cartridges with the bullets reversed, other cartridges where the bullet had been cut on the slant so as to inflict a diabolical wound, and a sword bayonet with saw edges. He referred to an address he delivered to the Northumberland*, when one of tbe men said to blni, "lien, go back and tell them there ore only three left out of my company, bnt we are not beaten, and we have accounted for more of their men then they have of ours." "Onrmen," proceeded Mr Tiliett "are prepared to tight, and It Is up to us to give ihcra the munitions they want." The British Army, he Bald. In conclusion, was placed on thirty miles at battle front, against more than 300 miles that the French were holding, hut that thirty five miles was the crui of the position.