WOMAN'S BLACK VEIL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 15807, 2 January 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

WOMAN'S BLACK VEIL.

INCIDENT ON THE MARCH.

THE FOREIGN LEGION.

LIFE IN THE TRENCHES.

It has been interesting, writes Mr. G. Ward Price in the London Daily Mail, to hear the impression which, war has made on a man whose previous life had been so like one's own, especially as some of these newly-joined volunteers of the Foreign Legion are having very much the same sort of experiences as will come later on to our own Territorials and to Kitchener's men. They. too. had had no experience of war and little of military training before* the campaign begun, but being attached to a crack corps like the Legion, they have 1 cached the

firing-line before the volunteers of other branches of the allied armies. 1 have come across an officer who had made acquaintance both with fighting in the open and with holding trenches, and there was no doubt as to which he preferred. "We had been four days on end in the trenches when I left," he said, " and in this weather, at any rate, holding a trench is like living in a damp tomb. Imagine a ditch so narrow that two men cannot pass one. another in it without touching. A ditch separated at intervals into compartments by walls of earth running across it, with a corridor

running round in a 6emi-circle at the back to get round the barrier, which is meant to diminish the effect of enfilading fire in case it should be brought to bear by the enemy. Imagine yourself there with your rifle resting constantly on the parapet in front, ready to be seized for useat an instant's notice. Life in the Trenches.

; You are forbidden to pass along the ditch beyond th© end of your own section without permission and except, for some special reason. Our view in front is bounded by the crest of a slope similar to the one in the side of which you are sheltering, and along that slope are the enemy against whom you must be ready for attack or defence at any hour of the day and night. That is a trench, and life in it is as dull as the ditch-water which trickles plentifully away along the gutter at the bottom. There you fight and live and sleep and eat and smoke, find it is not long before the sleeping and eating and smoking oome to seem to be far more important than the fighting. The question of food, above all : what luxury in civilian life is there to I be compared with the delight of having a, hot meal in the trenches? The wood I that has gone to the cooking of it has often been obtained at the risk of a man's life. The black days are those when yon get only bully beef and biscuit to eat. iou are cold, and you know that eating your tinned meat will make you colder still. In fact, you get so cold that I have seen ■ some of the Russians and Poles belonging to the Foreign Legion dancing their national dances in the trenches to get warm. A Sad Sight. There were some touching little incidents on the way as the Legion marched up from their base to the front a fewweeks ago. They are great singers in the Foreign Legion, with a whole repertory of songs of their own, many of them suitable solely for military audiences. One day, as they were swinging through a villase, the whole column roaring one of its choruses, they came to an old lady in the deepest mourning who stood weeping by the roadside. She had evidently lost a near relative in the war, and the sight of the marching column had opened the wound of her grief afresh. As the first ranks reached her she suddenly took off her black crepe veil, and, tearing it j into nieces, thrust them into the hands of the leading men. With the superb intuition for appropriate action charac- \ teristic of the French, the soldiers fastened the little fragments of crepe to , their rifles, or, raising them to their lips, placed them in their breasts. And at I once the whole battalion's song broke off. In a silence disturbed only by the tramp of their own feet, the Foreign Legion marched past the heartbroken old woman, and it was a mile outside the village before they cleared their throats and struck up their song again. Then there was an old man who wore the green and black medal ribbon of 1870. who came up to the colonel as the battalion was on the march one day. " Fortv-four years ago," he said, "the Prussians killed my father and insulted my mother while I was with the army. I am thankful that I have lived to see this day. La- revanche! Tt is what I have hoped for all these forty-four years. I am too old now to fight; but will you not let me go along with the battalion? I will run errands, or fetch wood, or do anything. Only let me see you kill some of the Prussians whose fathers killed mine in 1870. I ask for nothing more." So the old man was taken along. At night he slept among the troops; a blanket was found for him; only one could he spared, though the nightu were bitterly cold, and he shared the rations of a company. But one morning, when the reveille sounded in the first grey light of 'he dawn, the old man did not stir. HL r.ddier friends shook him. but he lay still. He had died of exposure in ' the niaht. and before they moved off i thev buried him there, happv. no doubt, in his death to have seen at Inst French soldiers marching aerainst the ■ enemv whose outrages he had remembered all through the long years.