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
Among the first men in Bloemfontein and the first to make the
acquaintance of this maiden was Mr. Gwynne, of THE FRIEND. Foreseeing
Sunday, and scenting a chance to revive the best memories of
civilised life, he proposed to gather two army friends if she would
invite two of her feminine friends for a drive and a luncheon on the
veldt on Sunday. He invited James Barnes, the talented American
correspondent, and myself. In two Cape carts we called for the young
ladies at their homes. They proved to be the very blond young woman, a
fourteen-year-old friend, and a little girl of ten or eleven years of
age.
I confess that I never would have asked mere children upon such an
outing; but it is equally true that I could not have experienced
either the same or as great and peculiar pleasure with others of older
growth. They were frank and free, and merry as grigs. They came as
near to having us killed or captured by the Boers as I wanted to be,
and from them we learned most interesting and valuable information
about the enemy and about the town as it was before we captured it. We
proposed to visit the home of one of the girls, a farm which the girls
said was "quite close." It proved to be miles beyond the British
outposts in a country that seemed to us to be uncomfortably peopled
with Boers and which proved afterwards to have been alive with them.
Of the danger to us which lay in such a situation the girls took no
account. They had been born there. They had seen nothing of war, and
did not understand it. The Boers were their lifelong neighbours. And,
in a word, they were going to visit friends and to have fun, and
nothing else entered their minds.
When we were miles away and among some very suggestive little kopjes
we discovered that our friends had lost their way and that we were
adrift on the veldt. Boers dashed up to the crests of the hills, saw
us and disappeared. Boers were on every hand. Why we were not gobbled
up and sent to Pretoria none of us can explain. Eventually, with only
one mishap--the overturning of one of the carts--which seemed for a
moment more terrible than capture by the enemy--we reached the
farm-house, and aided by several tiny boys and the farmer and his
wife, spent a happy hour and a half. We made our way back to
Bloemfontein in the evening, and within a day or two Colonels Crabbe
and Codrington and Captain Trotter were wounded and the Honourable
Edward Lygon was killed, at the Glen--a rifle shot from where we had
picnicked!
The adventures and hairbreadth escapes in war are apt to take only
three or four well-ordered forms. This adventure was in no way like
those of the stereotyped kinds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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