Notes and Comments.

Feilding Star, Volume XII, Issue 3022, 17 August 1916, Page 2

Notes and Comments.

The Power Behind Verdun. France is reiving on motor transport ia its wonderful defence of Verdun, and tho French automobiles have proved more than a mutch for all the strategic lines built by tho Germans before tho beginning of tho great assault, A (special commission was constituted by tho French High Command to arrange for the working with clock-like regularity of 200 automobile sections—that is to .say. some 4000 motor vehicles. All these convoys had to bo provided with rmtrol. oil. and g'-oaso. Each flny tli'cv hnd to run soiiw A~> miles, and consumed over 10.000 gallons of petrol, over 4000 gallons of oil. and about 44001b of grease. In tho district reserved to motor traction an average of nearly 2000 lorries pass each day in either direction, an average of one lorry every 25 seconds. Foolish, on the Face of It. , Tho Palniersston Times is tho modiuin for offering a gratuitous insult to our Anzacs in the following paragraph: "Mr W. Thomson, speaking at Lady Stout's meeting at tho Empire Kail, said that ji Scotchman who 'had three soils at the war. one of whom hod been killed at Gallipoli. and one or' whom liad ))c<!n severely wounded, had told him that his boys had written' to him slating that soldiers with the Main Body had deserted and gone over to tho Turkish trenches, and had called hack. 'You're not at Trentham now! , " Tho statement was so obviously the grossest of exaggerations that wo had decided to take no notice of it. But a deputation of two returned Main Body men called upon ua and asked to make a contradiction of it through' the Star. "Tho man who used the statement and the man who repeated it in print." said one of the Anzacs, "did not think of tho many mothers who have lost sons at Gallipoli." "And." added the other—a man who was on Gallipoli from start to finish—"the storyteller is a fool as well as a liar: for we of the Main Body were never in Trentham Camp! So how could we be taunted about Trentham?" Truly, the liar needs to have a good memory. The Kakariki Enterprise., As will be'found by tho perusal of a telegram published in another column of-to-day's "Star, the Wellington Meat Export Co., which was very anxious to start works in the Feilding district, has purchased" the works at Castlecliff, IWanganui. Tlhis should settle tho hopes and aspirations of the promoters of freezing, works at Kakariki, a movement which had the [strong backing of tho W.M.E.C, es- ; pecially as it is intimated also that tho company proposes to considerably increase tho capacity of tho Castlecliff works for the coining season. Tho end of tlie Kakariki opposition should be taken as the best of good news by fanners throughout this district—which extends from the mountains to the sea, from-the Rangitikei to tho Manawatu rivers—for it will enable them to concentrate oil the Feilding works, for their own immediate benefit and for a future safeguarding against the operations of the Meat Trust. It will mean an immediate development of the Feilding works. If .farmers will only combine and' determine to he loyal each to the other, resisting the temptation offered by the Trust of a temporary advance in price against that offered by farmers' works —then there is no hope of a Trust succeeding here or anywhere else in New Zealand.