FROM ARMENTIERES

Taranaki Daily News, 14 January 1935, Page 8

FROM ARMENTIERES

“MADEMOISELLE'S” MESSAGE. NOW WIFE OF BRITISH SOLDIER. People all over Britain on the night of November 10 listened-in to a broadcast by “Mademoiselle from Armentieres.” Her identity was a secret. At the end of the talk she tried, to send a message to her father and sisters in France. And 'at that moment she hurst into tears. Listeners heard only a’few sobs before she was cut off. Then silence. Later a Sunday Express representative learned the secret of this woman, whose history is a miniature epic of the war. She is Mrs. Albert Rogers, the French wife of an ex-British soldier, now living happily with her husband at Barnes, London. In 1914 Mrs. Rogers was little Simone Duretz, aged thirteen and a-half, living with her parents at Armentieres. War came. The Duretz family, after one hapless attempt at flight, returned to Armentieres, and lived in the cellar of the little cafe which they had run all their lives. They saw terrible sights . . . men blotted out by shellfire . ... civilisation crumbling before their eyes ... A gas shell took the life of the mother of the family. One day a Royal Fusilier corporal sat outside their cafe playing a guitar. Years later, when the family had opened a shop at Le Touquet, a corporal took shelter during a storm. It was their friend of Armentieres, Corporal Albert Rogers. In 1920 the British corporal, now “demobbed,” the little French mademoiselle were married in England.