STRANGE SIDELIGHTS

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 28 May 1915, Page 2

STRANGE SIDELIGHTS

THE MAItING OF O^FIGEHS. Generally, about once a month, a billeting officer visits, my house, and asks if I would like one or two more subalterns (says Albert Darrmgton, writing from London to the Auckland Star>." The answer is given and two or three hours later a blushing Eng-i Lsh boy, aged 17, with the w^ist of | a, school girl, enters, followed by a mountainous load of military impedimenta and accoutrements. It is probably his first appearance out of a school house, and one is inclined to think that Ins country is guilty of a crime in sending him to fight Germans But see him on parade after the first week with his company His orders are barked right and left; the school girl blush leaves his cheek, and you discover that beneath the velvet softness of ?boyhodd is something resembling, the sinews o& a warrior. Ip. three months he is able to handle his company almost to his colonel's satisfaction. In four months' he is in the firing line, where his men are begging him for God's sake not to give the German snipers a chance.

AND THEIR UNDOING

Kitchener's Army, the one in the making, contains some of the wealthiest* recruits in the world. Many of them will not accept commissions, but prefer to be plain Thomas Atkins uru til the war is over. Coming as they do from the lap of luxury undreamt of even by very wealthy Antipodeans, they seem to possess no sense, of money values. Only the bthe* night, one of these boys, at present billeted in my house, ~was inveigled into a shop by a woman of the world, and "soaked for two hundred poumis^ "worth bf jewellery. Amazing to" see how these youngsters are fleeced the moment they pass from the control of their parents. No shearer of,the backblocks ever shed his wealth so .easily. One can almost forgive the shopkeeper and the lady charlatan, but one is inclined to call for,the,,,po'ice when-the cold-blooded adventuress appears with the secret marriage in her eye. The war has been responsible for the abduction of many young subalterns, for it amounts to nothing more. At the Winchester Assizes, recently, a woman was tried for marrying herself to three young Army officers. Two of her victims had been induced to assign a good deal of property to her before going to France. Tne judge presented her with three years' peual servitude. His Honor 1 said he regretted his inability to attach a time-fuse to some of the boy-snatch ers who escaped the law. This time-fuse idea, coming from a respectable British judge, will bear a lot of thinking out.

WAR AND THE DESTITUTE

Yesterday, near the -Victoria Embankment, I saw a tramp take a chunk of dirty bread and push it through a house railing. A few minutes later he knelt on the pavement and began fishing for it with a short stick. His struggles to get that piece of bread would? have brought tears to the eyes of the most case-hardened policeman. In a short time the usual crowd had collected, and the usual flow of small coins fell into the tramp's palm. He told me afterwards that he had worked the stunt through all the big towns. "The war," he said, "had turned' a stony-Jiearted public into human bemgs." Certainy the nation of shopkeeoers has become wondrously sympathetic. The blind man with his organ comes each morning to his pitch in a taxi. The "Weary Willies" have vanished from the Embankment. The Government has found them iobs in ammunition factories and dockyards. The war has hit _ the^ professional classes, but the "homeless and destitute" are better off than at any other time of their lives.