FRENCH ARMY SERVICE

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 March 1935, Page 7

FRENCH ARMY SERVICE

EXTENSION NECESSARY LOW BIRTH RATE EFFECT [by CABLE —PBESS ASSN. —COPYEIGHT.] PARIS, March 15. The anticipated doubling of the period of military service was announced in the Deputies and the Senate. The Government proposes eighteen months’ instead of a year’s service for recruits called up in April, and two years, instead of a year, for those called up in October, and from 1936 to 1939. The age for conscription will be 21, instead of 20. The enlistment and re-enlistment of professional soldiers will be increased. These measures will not augment the army’s normal strength of 230,000, but will fill the gap, consequent upon the lower birthrate in the war years, which otherwise would reduce the strength o 118,00 in 1940.

The declaration poitns out that Germany, at the beginning of 1935, had 480,000 men in addition to semi-mili-tary formations, while France.had 278,000. Germany would have six hundred thousand in 1936, compared with France’s 208,000 if the scope of service were not increased. Such a difference was inadmissable, even if seventy-two thousand French troops at home stations, reserved for foreign service, were included. Cheers greeted M. Flandin’s statement that neither France nor Britain acquiesced in Germany’s unilateral decision to re-arm. BERLIN’S DEFENCES ANTI-RAID TEST. LONDON, March 15. The “Daily Chronicle’s” Berlin correspondent says: Women crowded the drapery stores here, buying heavy cloth to darken their windows during a. mass air attack which General Goeripg has organised for the nighttime on March 19, when the city’s air defences are to resist a supposed attack by hundreds of bombers, the attackers, significantly, approaching from the direction of Russia. The newspapers publish five columns of regulations, which the citizens must observe. They include imprisonment for any s persons appearing- at their windows to watch the gas-masked firemen and Red Cross workers, and troopers. Then on March 20, -’the traffic in one ...district will be brought to a standstill. The offices and shops and houses are to be closed from 9 a.m. till 3 p.m. . “Meanwhile, a dozen air bases are springing up in -a ring of sixty miles round Berlin. Seaplane bases are also being developed on the Baltic coast. Cellars, invisible from above, are being built to store ammunition and petrol.