The Seaforth News, 1943-10-14, Page 6In the Ruins of the Ruhr.
`.filo fact presents itself that wars
are repeated time ,and Again on the
Baine areas of the world map. Geo;-
aphical influences have made such
places es the Valley of the Nile, the
niciiintaiupasses of Northwest India,
the plains of• Belgium and Northern
France and the river courses of Rus-
sia inevitable battle grounds, And of
the Rhine, Victor Hugo once wrote:
"For 30 centuries it has seen the
forms and reflected the shadows. of
almost every warrior who has tilled
the 01d World with that tool they
call the sword," Certainly from Cae-
sar, Attila, Charlemagne, Napoleon
and Bismarck, down to Hindenberg,
Foch, and Haig, great soldiers have
marched their armies .beside that
stream, From east and westin our
own generation millionsof men in
victorious and avenging armies must
close in on the sante historic river.
Nothing Bless thau the complete con-
quest and cleansing of Hitler's do-
main.
In the meantime a relatively small
and crooked tributary of the Rhine
has been the object of persistent at-
tention from the aerial warriors of
Britain, Canada and the United
States. It is called the Ruhr, a stream
only 150 miles long, but it flews
through and names a valley that be-
fore the bombings began was the That was 14 years ago, Today
busiest and most concentrated Indus- Freya Madelaine Stark, the unknown
trial region on earth. This statement English girl who stumbled over Ara -
will be easier to grasp if we take the bic love songs, is renowned through -
carefully calculated estimate of a out the Middle East.
German industrialists of pre -wax World powers are interested in
days. Every working day in the her. Swarthy Artur Grobba, Nazi
Ruhr, he says, the volume of raw and oriental expert, and his best woman
finished products handled would load field worker, 53 -year-old Paula
D, train of cars 80 miles long, Yet this Koch, would pay ollt • many gold
realm of coal and steel is less in pieces for exact information regard -
area than Rhode Island, But mines ing the elusive Miss Stark and her
and factories are found in every day-by-day activities.
coiner of it, and there are areas But if the thread of Freya Stark's
where the population is settled at life has been woven into the iatric
the rate of 1,300 to the square mile, ate pattern of political intrigue, it
is due to the incidence of war. She
was first drawn to the Eastern des-
ert by its mystery, by the call of the
unknown. She possessed no political
creed. Her aim was to Learn, not to
teach. But, like another famed ad-
venturer, T, E. Lawrence, her intim-
ate knowledge of the life and com-
mon language of the Arab people
was to prove of inestimable value to
her country.
In World War I, the youthful
Freya served as a nurse in a British
hospital on the Italian battlefront.
In World War II, she has again been
drawn into her country's service, al
though her name figures in no offic-
ial connnuniques and makes no head-
lines.
The English West Country claims
Freya Stark. Sculptor Robert Stalk
was her father. He saw that his dau-
ghter had a good continental educa-
tion, and for many years after she
was grown up Freya lived in Italy.
It was in 1927 that Freya first hit
the trail of adventure. Although of
delicate physique (she is ,barely 5 ft.
8 in,), she left Italy for the Orient,
traveling' in asmall cargo -boat bound
for the Near East.
She had a mere smattering of Ara -
coal and steel centres of Britain or
the United States: Dusseldorf, Bar-
men, Hagen, ltftillieini, Dortmund and
the rest.' Short months ago the Ruhr
was a grim, unlovely valley shrouded
in smoke by day, lit up by the. glow
from a thousand furnaces by night.
But the Ruhr is now a valley of desp-
lation, and the smoke by day and the
are by night are not the signs of in-
dustry and prosperity, but the signals
of defeat and disaster—signals that
will spread eastward toward the
Ebiue,
A Modern Lawrence
Of Arabia
Perched high up in a hillside vil-
lage above Beirut is a small, squat
stone house, backed by dark pine
trees. In one of its white -washed
rooms a golden -skinned young Syr-
ian boy sat listening intently to a
dark curly-haired Tnglish girl read-
ing aloud from a volume of Arabian
love lyrics.
Her accent was terrible, Frequent-
ly the young man stopped her, ex-
plained, expostulated, and did his
best to show how the words should
be spoken, It was difficult, but with
a certain dogged perseverance the
reader blundered on to the end.
From this speck on lite map in nor-
mal times over a hundred million
tons of coal are mined annually. Be-
sides the coal mines and iron found-
ries, cotton mills, tanneries, glass
and chemical works abound
Essen, best known and most merci-
lessly bombed city of the Ruhr, has
a story suggesting some of the famil-
iar phases of au American "boom"
town. Though its founding reaches
back into the ninth century, it was
but a slumbering hamlet for hund-
reds of years. As late as 1850 its
population was a mere 10,000. It was
when the Erupps began to flourish
and the greatest machine shop the
world has ever known took shape
that Essen developed rapidly into a
vast industrial city. First of the
Erupps established a little workshop
where, by hand, he made the tools
used by tanners, carpenters and
blacksmith who worked along the
banks of the Ruhr and the Rhine.
Also hand -made were the dies he
delivered to the government mint
and which won official approval for
titre workmanship. And the excellent
quality of the tools he made brought,
through the years, orders from far-
away lands. Modern mass -production
technique, in one of its phases at bic, learned from a Franciscan friar
least, was born at irupps when a at San Reno and a course at • the
special machine rolled spoons in London School of Oriental Lan -
their hundreds from one block of guages. She had one aim in view: to
metal. When the era of railroad ex- perfect her knowledge of classical
Pension arrived the works at Essen and colloquial Arabic, so that she
were enlarged and the manufacture might travel and explore the Arab -
of steel rails, tires and parts or cast- ian desert.
ings of all sorts kept the workmen After a voyage that was sheer en -
busy night and day. Eventually, the chantment, she reached Beirut, and
payroll of the company, even in i for three months of winter Freya
peacetime, sometides harried 100,000 froze in the little house on the slopes
Haines. of the Lebanon, hampered in her
But it was the stupendous output studies by ill -health, but reveling in
of mrnitions, guns and armor plate the joy of being free all day long to
that made the name Krupp notorious do her own work. Her own view was
throughout the world and brought that this alone was well worth cross -
the agents of governments from
China to Peru to spend fabulous
sums at Essen, For years, above the
shrill fadtory whistles, the rattling
gears and pounding hammers at the the desert and its many hidden sec -
Krupp works, every day brought the rets, the young Englishwoman work-
ing the world for.
In the colorful Syrian country,
within sight of Mount Hermon,
knowing that beyond the horizon lay
roar of artillery on the proving fields
where new guns were tested, And
amid all the noise, smoke and seem-
ing ronfusion loal and steel entered
one end of the long line of foundries
and machine shops to emerge at the
other as guns, bigger and more sin-
ister guns; or as locomotives with
steam up, ready for a trial rim; as
plows ready for the farm, or as shin-
ing , tools and instruments of pre-
cision ready for a htousancl jobs of
peace or war. Mix the achievements
of Essen with the absurd superiority
complex and you have the formula
that inspired dreams of world con-
quest, and which lit the fuse of the
bomb that threatened to shatter civil-
ization. And we suspect history will
record that the bombs from the sky
which reduced Essen to rubble diad
much to humble the arrogant Hun
and hasten his doom,
Essen, of course, le not the whole
of the Ruhr, but is the centre and
symbol of its once -seething life and
seething industry, There is a long
Parade of other towns, each stepping
on the heels of another, Their
names are almost as familiar as the
ed and planned for the future.
What she wanted was not the time
honored itinerary of the globe-trot-
ter, but adventure into unknown de-
sert regions, where she might solve
some of the riddles of the past.
Was she successful? Within six
years she had been awarded the Roy-
al Geographical Society's Back
Grant for her discoveries in Persia,
and was the first woman to receive
the Royal Asiatic Society's Burton
Memorial Medal for outstanding ach-
ievements in the field of exploration
in Asia. Her books today are every-
where hailed as classics of travel.
Freya Stark's lone journey in the
mountains of Northern Persia re-
sulted in the discovery of one of the
last strongholds of the Assassins,
strange Ismaelite sect of Islam,
whose rulers killed by dagger and
poison 900 years before the Crusad-
ers went to Asia. •
Unaccompanied, except by a few
tribesmen, she traveled through the
bandit -ridden regions, her knowl-
edge of the language making her in-
dependent of any interpreter.
'Friends of Freya Stark picture
her as having a mania for wearing
Arab elothes, but add that she looks
charming in evening frocks. She can
live like a native; can go for days
without clean clothes and baths
without complaint, but revels in.
twentieth-century luxuries when she
can get them,
Danger is Freya Stark's spice of
fife, Solitude holds no fears for her,
for she believes it to be the "one
deep necessity of the human` spirit
which is never given adequate rec-
egnition."
In the Middle East today she
works among the better -class Arab
women, She is spearhead of a great
postwar movement for their ethanes-
potion.
Where no man flare enter, Freya
Stark is free to visit as a , welcome
guest, In their own homes she talks.
to the women, discusses their pers-
onal probleii , tries to pave the way
for a wider view of life,
Officialdom has shrouded much of
her present work in mystery, All the
more outspoken are the Nazi broad-
casts. They intimate that she is busy
organizing "secret societies" with
branches in Iraq and Egypt, that she
tours the hill country with cinema
vans to counter Axis propaganda.
But Goebbels and his friend the
ex-GI'anci Mufti of : Jerusalem are
slipping fast, In Saudi Arabia, Syria,
lransjordania, and Iraq, British'
propaganda has acme out ori top,
and Freya Stark has a job to do in
winds she never fails.
How To Prevent
Cattle Bloat.
Bloat in cattle causes much loss
every year in Canada and in the
United States. For Want of sufficient
roughage in the feed, a large quan-
tity of gas accumulates in the stem -
THURSDAY, OCTQBER 14, 1943
*1
sorbed into the blood stream often
hos fatal eoiisogueilees.. Investiga-
tions by the Division of Animal Pa-
thology, Science Service, Dominion
Department of Agriculture, show the
addition of sufficient roughage will
prevent bloat and also permit the
animal to be pastured on green for-
age, If animals. are turned out daily
to pasture, they should be fed rough
forage beforehand: No rule of thumb
method can be given, states the Div-
ision, but the prevention of bloat is
essentially a matter of supplying
roughage to animals feeding on suc-
culent pastures.
ash of the animal and when it is ab -
Mb
WAYS FOR WARMTH
, That old adage"you can't have your cake and eat it" has changed during
these war days to "you can't have your coal and burn it." Canadians will
want to make certain of getting all the beat possible from the coal they
burn during the next six months. Warm air registers and cold air return
grills should never be obstructed with rugs or furnitue. The young housewife
in the pictue above 'knows that unless they are clear. the free circulation of
air cannot take place.
Ch
ooks:
We Peire Selling Quality Books
Books are Well Made, Carbon is Clean and Copies Readily.
All styles, Carbon Leaf and Black Back. Prices as Low as You
Can Get Anywhere. Get our Quotation on Your Next Order,
•
The Seaforth News
SEAFORTH, ONTARIO,
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