"ALIEN'S" LETTER FROM ENGLAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3383, 15 January 1919, Page 51

"ALIEN'S" LETTER FROM ENGLAND.

(Specially Written for the Ladies' Page.) AT THE MOMENT. October 28. Apart from the great question, the "T<s* J be or not to be" of peace, there are lesser matters that are absorbing the attention at this moment' in the great hour of the world. War, famine, and pestilence are the three spectres that haunt*the earth in this "historic year of 1918, and with icy fingers test the pulse of the nations. .We of the British Empire are not given to howling, bub we have suffered nevertheless, and in Ebgland to date we are faced with, perhaps, the bitterest winter of the war. On every hand, on all sides, is the growing realisation of what we have escaped. We know in these front trenches ' of England that we are not yet "through the wood," that the wounded animal, Germany, may in its death struggle turn and try to rend its opposers. This is-not "official." But that "something" is expected—a . dash at the British coast-j----before the enemy is finally beaten is evident to those who, watch the signs. During the past two weeks thousands and thousands of soldiers have been billeted into thia little.town, and from Dover all along the coast tens and hundreds of thousands. Why ? Unofficially "practising." We guess there is some other reason. Now, when the war is supposed to be practically over, there is an official reason for peppering the south-east coast with khaki, and rumours are abroad that one of the last desperate acts of the enemy

will be an attempted invasion. i Perhaps. But meanwhile "whistling K' through the hollow goes the boy that minds the mill." In other words, the soldiers as they march past, regiment after regiment, whistle and sing as they have not whistled and sung for months. The "bomb-dodgers," as the alien crowds were contemptuouslv called who surged out of London during the airraids, paying any money for shelter at Brighton and the up-river resorts where • raids were unknown, are, now the danger is past, swarming back to London. It is a year since they crept away, and they have crept back as they went, making all sorts of excuses —save cowardice—for their going; family affairs—anything—is admitted save bombs. But they have not had a very happv retreat, for the better- • class aliens have oeen coldly looked upon, and the volunteers for war work in the canteens, etc., have received the cold shoulder. Whitechapel, Maida Vale, Soho, St. John's Wood had to entertain one an-

other at Brighton. A poor sort of consolation that the greatest achievement in the great war was saving their own skins! The leading topic of the week is the scourge called ' "influenza," for want of a better name. It is raging throughout the country, and in different parts it is decided to close the theatres and kinemas; many'schools are already closed. Nearly 2000 London policemen are down, many hundreds in the employ of the London Omnibus Company, and in all the provincial towns corresponding numbers are ill. Entertainments for wounded soldiers are cancelled from "headquarters, and it is suggested that churches as well as places of entertainment should be closed while the epidemic is at its height. London bacteriologists and medical men agree that it is influenza, and other men as eminent say that it is a type quite different from anything we have seen before, the symptoms exhibited by recent patients being something quite new. Hundreds of cases occur in a district every day, and undertakers are unable to cope with burials, in some places soldiers are employed on coffin-making. Judges on the bench, ministers, lawyers,- nurses in hospitals, servants in public offices, children, and school teachers all are affected; husbands and wives in several cases both die on the same day, and brides are buried on the day fixed for their marriage. Thousands of soldiers aTe ill, and the pneumonia cases are on the increase. So deadly is this plague in its effects that people have died in omnibusses and trains, and an actor _ in his dressing room. As a nation, with the exception of the outbreak of influenza in the summer and the present more serious epidemic, the health of the people has been excellent. Had it not been so the marvellous output of work would never have been accomplished, and in this eleventh hour

of straggle a superabundance of energy is still necessary. For there are signs that not only must wo work on, but that the hardships of this winter will be very real. We are warned that if the general publio is. to have anything like even the meat rations of the present after Christmas, it will be necessary to exercise the strictest economy for the next two months. This restriction is imposed for the purpose of eking out available supplies till after Christmas, when the worst of the winter has to be faced, and the Ministry of Food are impressing it upon everybody that meats and fats are going to be extremely scarce. Last week the loz ration of butter began. There will be no shortage in bacon and ham, large quantities coming from America, but it is of such salt and inferior quality compared to the British curing that no one will want any more of it after the war. It is anything but a good advertisement. There is little likelihood of much pork in the near future, for farmers are finding it almost impossible to keep pigs. For new-laid eggs 8d and 8£ are now being charged, the sellers evidently determined to make as much as possible before the prices are fixed. The following table of prices show the increase of a few of .many articles within the year:—

There was great pleasure in women's realm when the House of Commons recorded its opinion that it is desirable to make it legal for women to be M.P.'s by a vote carried by 274 to 25. An Act is still necessary. The women's party realise that many women need educating in the way in which their voting power should be used to better their own condition and the condition of their children, and improve social conditions. The slums in our great cities are a disgrace to this great nation. The woman wants security for the precious lives that she will give to the nation, and an even chance of health, education, and prosperity must be given to every boy and girl that is born into the world. There is room in this great Empire for every working man and woman in it to have a chance of happiness and success from the little faithful beginnings of labour. To ceaselessly toil, to work well all the working years with nothing to expect but a dependent old age is a wrong condition. And upon the women the after burden of the war will fall heavily. They must not-be shackled with meaningless chains j if they are to have a hand in the building up of the new world, hands and feet must be free for use. There is much that women alone can do in the reconstruction, and left unhampered you will find that she will go by instinct to the upbuilding of that which concerns her. To sit in Parliament is jiot her goal, bu'o it will give her the power to help make the path that leads to her goal—the betterment of mankind. "Justice to discharged soldiers and sailors" is very near the heart of women. Before our many projects are entered upon and women & rights or wrongs discussed, the women of England are passionately desirous that everything will be done that can be done in justice (not in charity) for those to whom the Empire owes its existence to-day as the land of the free. Perhaps because we have had, and have, and shall have, their sufferings and sacrifices so intimately before us, because the streets even now before the great release are strewn with the wreckage of manhood, that in every train and every 'bus in every house of prayer we meet the maimed, the halt, and the blind, it is borne in upon us the awfulness of the country's responsibility, of its shame, if wrethchedness be added to the woe of these disabled heroes if a sense of obligation be added by the State to the burden the gallant men willingly, cheerfully, courageously carried, and still carry, for the honour of our nation, for the home of you and me. That spirit, so fine that it shrank from nothing that became a man, must not be broken by the dole of a pauper nor the hungers of their ambitions and aspirations mocked by a picked bone grudgingly tendered. To settle into an armchair peace and not to care for those who gave us Victory would brand us for all time. So long as we live and one of these disabled soldiers and sailors lives, so long must we carry the Red Cross on our shoulders and in our hearts. So long as the British Emuiro lasts British obligation lasts to those who suffered torment for its sake. The danger is that by and by when the wave of emotion has receded the maimed will be stranded, taken for granted, their individuality, their personal loss overlooked in the general glory of their imperishable deeds. Law-making i 3 not a gentle thing, nor an ideal occupation for women, but just laws preserve the ideals of the world, and any little jostling a woman may get in helping to frame a justice, will be more than counterbalanced by the gentlewomanliness of righted wrong. If we women could have our way Germany would regret the brutal, horrible shame it has inflicted upon helpless women. The latest story by Malcolm Ross, with the New Zealand forces in Lille, adds one more to the awful lit of bestial crime for which the Huns must pay. There may be a thousand reasons urged why woman should not take her seat in Parliament, and a few of the reasons are " valid, but were she there in equal strength with men, the Hun would find it hard

to crawl his way back to the embrace of England. Olive Dent, in a recent article in the Daily" Mail, commenting on the attitude of women towards the armistice proposals, which was summed up aa "unrelenting," says :

The night nurse let her newspaper fall. Relent! She glanced round her ward. It was 2a.r0., and only a few minutes ego had the last of her patients fallen asleep. Each bed had a good part of the bedclothes turnei back, showing a bandaged leg "stump" resting On a pillow, and ©very few minutes the night nurse stole round) on tiptoe and flashed her torch on each stump to see if the dressing was "correct" and that there was no hemorrhage fromi the poor limbs. Relent I Her mind reverted to her past night duty, to a darkened .camp with falling bombs which exacted toll of dead, of "double ompufotiorMs" and lesser casualties to wounded, helpless, and defenceless men—with limbs on extensions or supported on "frames" — waiting, waiting for they knew not what further torture j to the "jaw case" who had been tended and! watched so incessantly and devotedly and who recklessly leaped from bed to take refuge beneath it at sound of the first bomb—for it was by a bomb "up "the line" that he hod received his terrible jaw injury. Relent I JShe thought of the men she had nursedl, 'all those magnificently brave, heroically patient, incomprehensibly cheerful men.i And the men, alas! whom she had.not nursed—her brother with his blue, laughterfilled, "ridiculously beautiful" eyes, long since glazed in death while his blood stained desert sand. That other one. too, inexpressibly dear, and now sleeping the sleep of the little wooden cross, his gift to England! a fair and noble manhood; England's gift to him . . , surely, surely, the substantiation of the ideals far which he fought. Relent! Memory recalled the tragedies the red screens had encircled, of gasping, staccato breathing, of the pain-sweat, the pallor of exhaustion, of quivering mouth pitiful in its distorted squareness, of the haunting look in fast-dimming eyes . . . of those last littlo honoured services which are all that a nurse can offer the dead.

Every woman who has suffered, every woman of sympathy, every woman* of understanding will remain '"unrelenting" until her prayer ia answered: Let not the deeds of our dead be forgotten; let not the sacrifice of them and of the maimed have been in vain; let not such suffermg and) wastage ever, ever in future ages he repeated. Let the end be no other than the oompletest fulfilment of the lofty aim for which bo many lives in the goodly grace of youth and a high nobility of spirit havo passed away beneath the swirl of grey waters, in the wrack of battle, or behind the red screens.

We who have seen shall not relent. Go any evening to Victoria or Charing Cross Stations and see the Red Cross- trains come in, and the surging, waiting, white-faced crowd of women and old men outside the barriers. As the ghastly procession is carried by the would-be cheers for hei*oes end in strangled sobs. One's little bunch of flowers seems almost an insult to offer, and that silence, reproved, a more fitting tribute where noise cannot speak like tears. So long as I live I hope I shall not forget, and remembering, remember not morbidly, but with pride that our sons of Empire loved Empire so well. One night, not long ago, as on other nights and early hours in the morning, there was one of those pitiable sights of wrecked humanity at St. Pancras Station, when the maimed and starved prisoners were repatriated from Germany. Seeing is believing, and those who see have no pardon or excuse of deeds so vile. Many of the poor soldiers had been forced to submit to unnecessary amputations. Some had lost a leg or an arm, or both legs and both arms; their sallow skms and emaciated forms told of semi-starvation. The workers of the London District Ambulance Column were there to meet the trains as they came in; ladies distributed messages from the King and Queen, and flowers and cigarettes, but not even the tenderness of British faces bending over their stretchers could brine: the smiles to those sad eyes haunted with the memory of unspeakable pain. The outcry for reprisals is growing louder; the people are suffering agonies of mind, because their own flesh and blood is being tortured in these German prisons. Those who come from Holland are dressed in khaki, but those from Germany direct are in the remnants of nondescript garments. Impotent rage at the Hun brutes fills the public heart; the country cries with the poor prisoner who wrote.'home, "For God's sake try to get England to do something to get us out of this hell."

1 Price last Price on Commodiity. December .' Saturday. s. d. s. d. Salmond, tall tin .. .. 1 11 2 5 Mustard, Jib tin .. 1 OJ 1 5J New-laid egge, dozen .. 4 8 6 0 Beetroots, dozen ., 1 8 2 0 Hares, each. .. 7 6 9 6 Venison, breast, lb .. .. 1 1 1 4 Brazil nuta, lb .. .. .. 1 6 3 8 Margarine, lb ., .. .. 1 0 1 2 Government cheese, lb .. 1 4 1 8 Condensed' milk, with. .. 1 U 1 2J Wing ribs of beef, lb .. 1 n 1 10 Leg of mutton, lb .. .. 1 7 1 9 Shoulder mutton, lb .'. 1 5 . 1 7 Cob nuts, lb ,. .. .. 1 6 2 6 Lemons, each .. 0 4 0 6 Dessert apples, lb .. 6d to 9d, 1 3d to 2s 6d .. 2 0 2 6