THE RUAHINE ARRIVES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIII, Issue 1709, 27 December 1919, Page 5

THE RUAHINE ARRIVES.

Per Press Association. AUCKLAND, Doc. 25. The troopship lluahine, with 42 officers, 3 nurses and 325 other ranks, arrived at Auckland on Wednesday night and berthed on Thursday morning. The Southern men left for their homos in the evening. The men complain bitterly regarding the accommodation, mess arrangements and food. On arrival at Capetown a court of inquiry was set up, and the findings are to be reported to the New Zealand Government.

The men whose homes lay south of Auckland were passengers by a special troop train which left the northern centre at * 4 o’clock on Christinas afternoon, and which passed through Palmerston North shortly after 3 o’clock on Boxing morning. Owing to indisposition, the Mayor, Mr J. A. Nash, who as chairman of the local Patriotic Society, has alvrays taken a warm interest in the returned men, and who has been invariably on hand to welcome them on their arrival, was unable to be in attendance, and Mr J. Permain, secretary of the Society, being out of town, no formal reception had been arranged for the local men who returned to Palmerston North. The only returned soldier identified who left the train here was Warrant Office!'* W. 11. James, D.C.M., eldest son of Mr E. A. James, of Bryant street, a member of Fourth Reinforcements, who enlisted in Wellington and was wounded at Gallipoli on August 8, 1915, and again at Flors in 1916. Warrant Officer James, who was Company Ser-geant-Major with the Taranaki Rifles, spent his last Christmas Jn Cologne, and after four, years and nine months’ absence from Now Zealand, was not unnaturally delighted to find himself once more amon'gst his own people. He spent hi» 21st birthday on active sendee.