A SOLDIER'S KING

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 27 May 1915, Page 2

A SOLDIER'S KING

A TiighlySplaced Belgian official has given, in the course of an interview, a very interesting account of the Belgian King Albert. "It is when anyone talks with our soldiers," said the minister, "that he perceives how the King is loved. They say, all of them, that they will die for him. He is constantly at their: side, encouraging them by his presence and bravery. At certain moments he adventures too far. Always he is in the very midst of the combat. .One soldier said to a friend of mine, who wrote to me:—'The King came arid placed himself by my side in the trench. He took the rifle of a soldier so exhausted that he could not stand, to give him a chance for rest 3 and fired commele plus petit piou-piou*—just like one of his own soldiers—during an hour and a half.'

"He himself carries the soldiers' letters to them, distributes among them the little packages that their friends and their parents send them from the homes now destroyed. He shares — what do you call it?—la ratatouille (soldiers' mess) with his soldiers, and always calls them 'my friends.' He does not want them to render him honors. He wishes simply to be a soldier, in the ,full strength of that term. One night he was seen, exhausted by fatigue, sleeping on the grass at the side of the road."