War's Brighter Side: The Story of The Friend Newspaper Edited by the Correspondents with Lord Roberts's Forces, March-April, 1900Ralph, Julian
History
War's Brighter Side: The Story of The Friend Newspaper Edited by the Correspondents with Lord Roberts's Forces, March-April, 1900
Ralph, Julian
Friend (Bloemfontein, South Africa); South African War, 1899-1902 -- Periodicals
Whoever can feel the spirit of that cry of satisfaction needs not to
be told how just and necessary was the war we were waging. Few of us
in the army could probe the sources of the war to their depths.
Comparatively few men in England thoroughly grasped the situation. It
is all revealed in this shout by Mr. Buxton in THE FRIEND. The
long-protracted feud between the two races, the injustice of Boer
rule, the sufferings of the British, the threats of the semi-civilised
men in power, the past troubles all ending in broken promises or
shameful neglect by the British Government--these are all apparent in
that cry of delight. The war had not produced such satisfaction. There
had been war before, and nothing but humiliation of the loyal
Uitlander had come of it. But a decided, firm declaration that the war
could only end in British sovereignty--that was news that thrilled the
heart of every Anglo-Saxon colonial in the republics and the adjacent
colonies.
Other articles and official notices of the first interest or
importance were as follows:--
THE HUMOROUS SIDE OF THE CAMPAIGN.
War is grim and fearsome and horrid as we know, or rather as
we are being continually told, but nobody seems to have
noticed that there is a humorous side to it, and sometimes
the spectre Death wears the cap and bells. Up to the present
the campaign has not been without its little amusing
incidents. In the camp they have been quite numerous, and
even on the battlefield itself they have not been
unfrequent. The story of a private at Paardeberg who lay
behind one of those ever-to-be-blessed antheaps, and
contemplating a shattered tibia, exclaimed, addressing the
injured member, "Well, you ain't done me badly after all.
You 'elped to carry me 'ere, and now you've got me a life
pension and free baccy from the parson," has the merit of
being true. One cannot refrain a smile at the soliloquy of
another private who wished to exhibit a bullet-riddled
helmet to his friends at home. He was firing from behind a
big boulder on which he placed his helmet. The inevitable
shower of bullets followed, but, as has been so often the
case with Boer marksmen, not a single one touched the
helmet, but one "fetched" its owner in the shoulder,
whereupon he took the helmet from its exposed position, and,
looking at his bleeding shoulder, remarked, "that comes of
cursed pride and nothing else."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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