UNAWARE OF WAR.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLII, Issue 11476, 2 March 1918, Page 2

UNAWARE OF WAR.

ONE OLD LADY WHO DOES NOT KNOW OF WORLD SLAUGHTER. A correspondent writes us:—! There is at least one person in the kingdom who should celebrate the coming Christmas season of Peace in the true sense, for there is living to-day in Hounslow an old lady in her ninety-ninth year who does not know that cruel war is being waged. Despite her great age, she is in possession of her faculties, with the one exception that her memory for dates and numbers is lost. Consequently at the outbreak of the war, her relatives wisely refrained from mentioning it in her presence, and have supplied her with papers and other literature to read (she is a great reader) of pre-war dates only. The old lady is at times, somewhat puzzled to notice that nearly all men to-d'«y dress alike, “in nasty dirty clothes, ” as she calls them; “but, then, my dear,’’ she will say to her relatives, “men’s fashions change, but I don’t like the latest. ’’ Guns, which she occasionally hears, she attributes to the testing of new explosives, and in every respect is blissfully ignorant of the titanic struggle of the nations.