TRAGEDIES OF THE WAR

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21616, 7 October 1933, Page 3 (Supplement)

TRAGEDIES OF THE WAR

HOW THE NEWS CAME TWO POIGNANT STORIES Many poignant stories have been submitted in response to the Sunday Despatch's invitation to readers to tell how they first heard news of the war. Mrs. R. Prietzel, of Newcastle, England, wrote: " War brought to me — the English wife of a German doctor —a terrible choice. My husband was a gallant German gentleman. I loved him devotedly, but I had been married before, and Dick, my only son, was English to the core. We sat together, the three of us, on that fateful night, looking down on the excited crowd thronging the Wilhelmstrasse. " A whisper ran along that mighty crowd. The worst had come. Dick stood up, white-faced, trembling. ' Mother,' he said, ' England will want me. I am going back.' Then they shook hands, those two men I loved. Stepfather and stepson, but henceforth enemies. I came back with Diek. Three months later they were both dead, killed within a stone's-throw of each other on the same day."

This story was sent by Miss A. Roberts, of Chelsea, in England: " We had waited seven years for the wonderful moment when we should stand together before the altar to be made man and wife. Ho was a soldier, and had been stationed out East, but at last he got a home station. On my way to the church in my bridal finery I thrilled with every motion as I envisaged him waiting for me at tho altar steps. " A messenger met me at the church door to toll me ' England is at war,' and that there would be no wedding, as my man was already en route for Belgium. There was no wedding—there never has been. He was killed."