KING UNDER FIRE.

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 11452, 28 February 1931, Page 12

KING UNDER FIRE.

AVAR SECRET REVEALED,

“Some shells whistle/] over our head to hurst oil the right of us while the King was noting how fiercely Soissons had been bombarded. . . This disclosure of the fact that the King came under shell-fire during a visit to the French front in October 191-j, is made in the fourth volume of the “Memoirs of Raymond Poincare,” French Premier at that time, a translation of which was recently published. 31. Poincare, the precise lawyer, reveals his heart in on e passage where he says that, on receiving the first news of the losses on the Loos-Cham-paguQ offensive, “I went into my library, and, alone with iny wife, I burst into tears.”

Mr. Poincare relates that Mr. Cumbon. then French Ambassador in London. told him that the King one day at Windsor said to Benckendorff, the Itussian Ambassador. ‘‘Oh. Constantinople. is, of course, a town which must in future become Russian,’ 5 but M. Poincare observes: “This remark which was made during luncheon, in no sense constituted on official promise.

“AA hen Grey and Nicholson w-ere questioned on the subject they protested that their promise had been subsequent to ours.” ,

At this time the Tsar was putting ■forward •a - claim for Constantinople at the end of the war. He asked Palelogue, the French Ambassador in St. Petersburg, to breakfast. and said to him: “My mind is entirely made up. , . . Tho town or Gonstantinople and Southern Thrace must be incorporated in the Russian Empire.”