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Taranaki Daily News, 6 October 1934, Page 15 (Supplement)

In those hectic times a pacifist was held to be a traitor and probably an agent in foreign pay. How was it possible at Lossiemouth to play golf with an “unspeakable fellow” like James Ramsay MacDonald? Yet the “unspeakable fellow,” expelled from the golf club, was on his way.

In the Italy of August, 1914, it would have been hard indeed to spot the superman of the future. Benito Mussolini? Incredible. As an •agitator, he was able enough, especially with his pen. But was Italy to be

ruled by the son of a revolutionary blacksmith? Had he not incited the people against the expedition to Tripoli and served five months in gaol? Had he not been a leader during the Red Week of the immediately preceding June? Yet, the greatest of the dictators was on his way.

In Munich there was a young man in his 26th year. By birth he was an Austrian. He worked as a carpenter and an architect and he painted in water-colours. In the German Army he enlisted as a private and, with millions of others, he was sent to the western front as cannon fodder. Adolf Hitler — gassed and winning the Iron Cross —was on his way. In Galicia there is a little place called Poronin. It is so small as to be omitted from the atlases. But in .August, 1914, there happened to be a quaintly thick-set foreigner in Poronin with square shoulders and a goatee beard. Nobody had the least idea why he was staying there. Poronin was not so far from‘the Russian frontier and, thought the Austrian police, the stranger might be a Tsarist spy. In order to be on the safe side they expelled the unknown into Switzerland and thought no more about him. Lenin was on his way; and it happened that, in Vienna, there was another unexplained stranger who also left hur-