The Brecon County Times Neath Gazette and General Advertiser for the Counties of Brecon Carmarthen Radnor Monmouth Glamorgan Cardigan Montgomery Hereford

U.S. SAVE FOR US. Americans Tighten Belts to Send Allies Food. [BY "OBSERVER."] AT the week-end I was in a country district in Berkshire, a remote place miles from everywhere," as a cot- tage woman described it to me. Very doubtfully I had enquired if she could get me some tea, and, to my astonishment, she offered me at once a meal of eggs and bacon. The eggs I could understand- her poultry were many (" We feed em mainly on potatoes," was a subsequent explana- tion), but the ready offer of bacon was a surprise indeed. Home fed, of course? I ventured. Oh dear, no; we are not allowed to keep a pig. It's, all shop bacon, and we prefer it. to butcher's meat in the warm weather. We haven't had too much until just lately, but this week the house is full of bacon, and you are very welcome to a bit." House full of bacon "-what could it mean. She explained in time. I send a weekly order down to W. In these days it is no good saying how much you want, so I just make a list-tea, sugar, butter, bacon, and so oil-aild the shop people send me what they can. But last week I got an eye-opener—they sent me five pounds of bacon. We can't eat five pounds of bacon—there's only three of us—so you will be doing me a kindness to eat a bit of it." I had a capital meal.* It was excellent bacon, and I said so. The woman agreed. There was a time when none of us would touch a bit of bacon unless we knew that it had been clean-fed. Nowadays we are not so particular. I don't know where it comes from, but it is very good. And just fancy-5 lbs. in a week, and there's a war on." I don't know where it comes from." The cottage woman's lack of knowledge on this point is something that ought to be set right quickly in simple fairness and thankfulness to the people who have made it possible for the non-food producers of England to find themselves so bountifully supplied with one of the best of foods in spite of all the havoc and dislocation and upset of the Great War. Sometimes dis- gruntled people turn on one with What is America doing in the war? Well, she is doing one thing which in itself wants more than a single column to do justice to it—she is pouring food into Europe to sustain us and our Allies at a time when the difficulties of getting food from other parts of the world are very formidable indeed. Let me give just one illustration of this. One of the greatest problems for us in the war is that of shipping tonnage for all the seaborne traffic necessary to keep every- thing going. To-day the needs of 120 million people in Europe have to be supplied by ocean traffic. To carry even 5,000 tons of food from Australia to Europe requires 15,000 tons of shipping, because of the long journey; similar service from the Argentine takes 10,000 tons; similar ser- vice from America only 5,000 tons. That is one reason why America has got busy in the matter of shipping us foodstuffs. Where Much of it Comes From. But before you ship food it has to be produced, and the great call in America is for the production of food for the use of the Allies. Production has been speeded up, but that in itself would not have helped us nearly enough. Our friends across the Atlantic swiftly realised this, and so they set about securing food sup- plies for us in Europe by the method of tightening their belts—reducing their own consumption and conserving food in all directions. There are twenty million households in the United States. To have rationed them with food cards would have been an almost impossible task; to have allowed prices to soar so that the extrava- gant purchase of food would have been checked would have been a great hardship on the poor. As a better way voluntary rationing was decided on--an appeal to the spirit of self-sacrifice, an appeal to every non-combatant to do his bit to help the cause of freedom in the hour of need. There has been a noble response to this appeal, and it is because of this response that bacon especially is so plentiful in England to-day. Our American friends set about food-saving last year with such good purpose that there was left in the market 150 million pounds more bacon than the experts estimated would be available, and our Food Ministry bought the lot. Voluntary rationing, free-will tightening- of the belt, enabled America to liberate for our use this bountiful supply of bacon, and it has come along just at a time when we need to go easy with our home-grown cattle supplies in order that the growing beasts may convert as much grass as possible into juicy flesh. The United States have saved for us in bacon and many other forms of essential food. Let us not forget it, and be grateful. I* To save trouble we assure the Food Controller that our contributor conscientiously has destroyed a half coupon in respect of this meal.—ED.]

YOUTH AND AGE. Jock carrying an ammunition box Pierre, an old French peasant, carrying Jock's rifle

THE DESPATCH CARRIER. LI3ritisli Official. A photograph taken during the fighting in Flanders. Dogs are trained as despatch carriers, and they are especially useful for cross-country cuts in this land of canals. The dog photographed in our picture has just crossed a canal carrying a message fastened to his collar.

A GLIMPSE OF THE EAST. [British Official. A Moslem tomb and date palms in Mesopotamia. British soldiers in foreground.

A SHEAF OF WAR STORIES. -0 Great Deeds Performed by all the Services. 11 I All for His Friend. Here is the wonderful story of a trench mortar gunner's devotion to a wounded friend in the recent battle of the Aisne. The T.M.G." was with a column of transport and artillery falling back on the canal formed by the waters of the Oise, when they were cut off by Germans, who had captured the only bridge available. Their one hope was to get across the canal, and they made for a likely place on the bank, the gunner half-carrying, half- dragging a wounded pal along with him. On the far side of the canal the gunner spied a boat, swam over and fetched it. Mr. Hamilton Fyfe tells a rather a dis- tressing story of what followed. While the gunner was getting his comrade into the boat a number of other men who had escaped came creeping towards them and begged to be taken over too. The gunner told them to get in and keep quiet. This went on until he had a crew of thirty im belonging to infantry regiments, as well as himself and his pal. It was all lie could do to get the boat over with such a load, and by bad luck they were spotted by the Ger- mans just after the boat had been pushed off. Instantly bullets spurted all round. The water was lashed by them, the boat was filled with groaning, dying men. It was a terribly unequal fight, for our men could not reply to the German fire; and out of the thirty who had been taken cn board only eight landed. The rest were either shot dead or in a dying state. Now the eight survivors of the infantry and the two gunners had to seek some way of getting across the stream of the Oise, which is separate from the canal. Between them and the stream was only a strip of land, but the strip was protected by barbed wire. Hoisting a wounded man over this was not easy, but they did it somehow and so came to the Oise. Here there was no boat, no means of crossing save by plunging in. In they all went. The water was deep, it came up to the necks of those who could not swim. The gunner had to steady his pal all the way over. He very nearly had him carried away by the current once when he slipped and went under, but at last all got ashore and into the shelter of a little wood. The Germans were still firing, but they could not tell now which direction the fugitives had taken, so their bullets fell wide. They all got back to a British unit, and the wounded man was handed over to a field ambulance. No man," Mr. Fyfe well says, "ever had a trustier friend than he." Stinging the Wasps. How the Hun airmen are being routed out of their nests in France and forced to fight is described by a party of British pilots who have just reached London. 1 The same thing has been happening all ) along the front," said one. The Ger- mans are becoming more and more chary of crossing our lines except for night- bombing raids. It is a long while since we have seen even two or three flying together engage in a fight which they could avoid, and a single Hun airman will not come anywhere near. So what we do is to settle over their aerodromes and drop bombs on them until they are compelled to move their machines. Directly they rise to seek safety somewhere else we shoot them down. This accounts in a large measure for the great number of German machines destroyed in the past month or so. We have to go very low for this kind of fight- ing, but it is the only way to get them on the wing at all. One squadron brought .down eighty machines in a week in this manner." Brave Nur$es Who Carried On." Everybody will rejoice to hear that the Military Medal has been conferred on a I group of brave women who carried on I their duties as nurses in a Red Cross Hospital while the Germans were bombing it. This was not the great murder raid on the hospital at Etaples on Whit Sunday, but an earlier raid at a smaller refuge for the wounded—a Casualty Clearing Station —in March. Sister-in-Charge Kate Maxey, although severely wounded her- self, went to the aid of another sister, who was fatally wounded, and did all she could for her. Sister Dorothy Penrose Foster showed conspicuous coolness and devotion to duty when supervising the transfer of patients from the casualty clearing station to an ambulance train while the locality was being steadily shelled. She set a splendid example of calmness and com- posure. Sister "Mary Agatha Brown saw her matron Wounded and another sister killed, but remained at her post tending the wounded until help arrived, and later she worked at the same casualty station for many hottrS> being all the time in great danger. Sister Marie Dow Lutwick was also there, and when the matron was i wounded she crossed the open bomb-swept ground alone to procure help. Miss Lilian I Audrey Forse, a V.A.D., was in charge of a hospital marquee when a bomb fell on it, doing great damage and injuring many of the patients. She carried on, the official record says, "as if nothing had happened." There are no words that adequately express our admiration for the splendid conduct of these noble women. We mention five cases, but let us not forget they are typical of thousands. Wounded W.A.A.C.'s Experience. There will be more of these Military Medals later on, for there are wonderful stories of the calm bravery and devotion to duty of the nurses who were machine- gunned during the night raids on the hospitals at Etaples, and at this moment in a London hospital are eleven W.A.A.C.s who were wounded and shell-shocked during an air-raid on their camp in France in the last week in May. One of these wounded gives an account of her experi- ence which we reproduce because it is a glimpse of the war which makes us prouder than ever of the grit of English girls who are sharing with our soldiers the risks of the war zone. She says :— On the night when we had the first serious experience of hostile raiding we were asleep in the huts. The guns started. Dressed in pyjamas, great-coats, and blankets-anything we could snatch in a hurry-we skipped along to the emergency itrenches, and there we stuck it for four hours. Three of the huts were destroyed, and those who had lost all their things carried on next morning dressed in great-coats, pinafores, and pyjamas until they could be refitted with uniform. On the night of the last raid we were again in ithe trenches, and a bomb fell on the edge of one of the trenches, and the only girl I have ever seen unnerved in these raids ran along to me crying like a little child and flung her arms round my neck. There didn't seem anything to do for her, so I simply held her while the 'planes came on. When the raid was at its worst we all clung to someone else. It seemed ito make things better. But we all kept calm. One of our officials ran out to help someone she thought had been wounded in the open, and one or two of the girls who had been a little excited were the first to calm down and help when they saw some of us who had been wounded. At first I did not feel so frightened as in the raids I have gone through at home, but soon the explosions began to throw us off our feet. We heard the cook-house go, and then a German machine came down very low and seemed to be searching for us. Three bombs came in quick succession in and near our trenches. Bits of mud and corrugated iron were flying all around us. We were blinded and thrown off our feet—and then I felrt a sudden pain in my side, but I was too dazed to say anything. Quite a lot of us were wounded, and I think that's what kept us cool. Otherwise I think I should have gone potty, but I kept thinking to myself, We must stand by and keep cool.' A thought which may be useful to some of us at home on moonlight nights when Z, the night-birds are dropping eggs. n You Stick It and I'll Stick It." This was in effect the slogan of the late Captain Eric Stuart Dougall, of the R.F.A. Here is the story of how he stuck it all one day from early morning till sun- set, keeping his guns always going, in spite of a continuous drenching of gas and high explosive shells. Finding that he could not clear the crest owing to the withdrawal of our line, he ran his guns on to the top of the ridge to fire over open sights. By this time our infantry had been pressed back in line with the guns. Capt. Dougall at once assumed command of the situation, rallied and organised the infantry, supplied them with Lewis guns, and armed as many zl_ gunners as he could spare with rifles. With these he formed a line in front of his battery, which during this period was harassing the advancing enemy with a rapid rate of fire. Although exposed to both rifle and machine-gun fire, this officer fearlessly walked about as though on parade, calmly giving orders and encourag- ing everybody. He inspired the infantry with his assurance that So lo'ig as you stick to your trenches I will keep my guns here." This line was maintained through- out the day, thereby delaying the enemy's advance for over twelve hours. In the evening, having considering the grounded the machine-gun fire.leadership ^OUga,rrtt°rtrying day there is no throughout this t y g ]ine was d0UM that a bre^h averted. J^1S e„ j.VpHdnff the fire of four days later wn«dUect.ngnoured his battery. lhe.?0vr splendid heroism with the V.C.