Page 9 Advertisements Column 3

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 51, 28 August 1914, Page 9

UNDER TWO FLAGS BEMINISCENOES OF PREVIOUS WARS. "After I had been twelve months in Australia, I wrote to my mother in Ber lin and told her that, although I had had a pretty hard time here, I would rather go through it all than go back to Germany. Oh, yes, I'm very glad I'm in Australia." The speaker was Mrs. Jaucks, of 'North Sydney, one of the hardy type of German emigrants who left the Fatherland to make a home under more favourable conditions m another land, and ' found as years rolled by that <mly a. memory bound them to the country by the Baltic Sea — a memory more often than not of hardship and bloodshed. She was telling a Sydney Daily Telegraph reporter some reminiscences of her early days, during which she waß ia the midst of a revolution and three wars, looked often upon starvation and death, and joined in the mourning over relatives and friends who had been killed in the various campaigns. It can be said that she was reared in an atmosphere of war, for she still has recollections of the stories her grandmother used to tell of the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. She heard also of the war with Russia, and the cruelties of the intradefs, who on one occasion broke into her grandfather's house and took all they could lay their hands on in the way of food. Mothers then used to quieten troublesome children by saying, "Be good, or the Russians will come." When only about seven years of age she looked upon many of the scenes of \he revolt in Prussia in 1848, when the present Kai ser's grandfather fled from Berlin disguised as a postman, to escape the fury of the mob. The latter barricaded the streets at various points, so that, tho soldiers could not march through. Afterwards she saw the men and women go out and pick up the dead and wounded, cut down by the fire of the soldiers. Things were better afterwards for the poor. She remembers sitting in the gutter with other children, waiting for the Government inspectors to come along and go into the bakers' shops. Any short-weight bread found there was thrown out into the street, and the baker was thrashed. Probably such summary punishment for fraud was found more effective than the slower method of modern law couits. Mrs. Jaucks remembers the war with Denmark ir« 1864, and that with Austria in 1866, where sne had an uncle killed. Then in 1870 the Germans were fighting France. The latter war came so quickly, the great mass of the people know of it only about a week before tho men were hurried to the front. She had a brother and a brother-in-law who went through the campaign and returned home unhurt. They used to tell of tho fearful scenes in Lorraine, where thoy saw blood running ih the gutters like water. But ia France ttiey n*4