KING UNDER FIRE.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18817, 4 March 1931, Page 4

KING UNDER FIRE.

WAR SECRET REVEALED. “Some shells whistled over our head to burst on the right of us while the King was noting how fiercely Soissons had been bombarded . . . This disclosure of the fact that the King came under shell-fire during a visit to the French front in October, 1915, Is made in the fourth volume of the “Memoirs of Raymond Poincare,’ French Premier at the time, a translation of which was recently published. M. Poincare, the precise lawyer, reveals his heart in one passage where he says that, on receiving the first news of the losses on the LoosChampagne offensive, “I went into my library, and, alone with my wife, I burst into tears.” M. Poincare relates that M. Cambon, then French Ambassador in London, told him that the King one day at Windsor said to Benckendorff, the Russian Ambassador. “Oh. Constantinople is, of course, a town which must in future become Russian,” but M. Poincare observes: “This remark, which was made during luncheon, in no sense constituted an official promise.

“When Grey and Nicolson were questioned on the subject, they protested that their promise had been subsequent to ours.” At this time the Tsar was putting forward a claim for Constantinople at the end of the war. He asked Paleologue, the French Ambassador in St. Petersburg, to breakfast, and said to him: “My mind is entirely made up . . . The town of Constantinople and Southern Thrace must be incorporated in the Russian Empire.”