SANDY’S

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 303, 24 December 1945, Page 4

SANDY’S

WE GIVE YOU A TOASTt

At this festive season o£ the year we give you a toast, you that like us and you that hate: "Wanganui and Its District!"—that we all enjoy this free-from-war Christmas as well as we deserve, that in the year ahead we will do all we can to

Help our own. city, our own our country and all that Britain stands for, that we do that ffiresp*'; five of class, creed, calling, or station, tnat when we are on top of the world looking doun we will be humble, ano when we are at the bottom looking up we will grin and move upward! To you and yours!—“S.” IT CAME LATE!

We feel very sorry for the chap who shot tliat French Admiral Darlan. We hope he can appreciate the grim irony ot being exonerated after being c ° n ' demned to death and executed A famous painte r once portrayed the dramatic arrival, on horseback, of a lover with a reprieve for a man about to oe shot. He wias actuallv lined up against a wall, and the captain of the bring squad was about to give the order to T lire when the girl rode into the execution yard. She got there in time. French politics, however, are not lik» love's voung dream—they get there 100 late! Still, it is probable that he may now lind a grave among honoured ancestry, instead of among the bad eggs of the French nation and, you can rely on us, there were quite a few! PATTON —SHOWMAN, BUT * A SOLDIER! The death of General Patton, (the picturesque commander of the United States 3rd. Army) is a big loss to the Americans militarily. Patton was a showman, lie said so hintself, but nobody doubted his ability as a soldier. In Sicily, in the face of opposition from those, "higher up,” he tried some amphibious operations which got his troops behind the enemy lines anil saved many casualties over difficult terrain. But it was not to write about Patton as a soldier we committed ourselves, but to recall that he u«s human. Once he said that he had no political ambitions. ”1 have no kind ot political ambition at all ” he said. "No—take that back—maybe I'd like to be mayor of Junction City, Kansas." We know a lot of people who would like to be mayor of even snaller places than Junction City, Kansas, and, more than that, you can take it from us. there are a good many mayors who would like to be commanders of armies. To hear them talk, you would think so. anyhow. So we know old "Georgie" I’attog was human, and. being human, was liable to meet death in any way God willed. It was not for this great general to die in battle, though he had been . wounded in World War one. He oied as the result of a road accident, just as a mayor might de. it was a V.C. Item, wasn't it. who slipped on a banana skin in a street and died?