OLD SOLDIERS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 155, 6 August 1914, Page 10

OLD SOLDIERS.

. ■ GATHERING OF SYDNEY VETERANS. The other evening in Sydney one sat at a dinner table with a number of men, some of whom were beginning to go grey about the temples or shiny as to j the top of the head, although they still looked to be for the most part strong men, well set up, and not in the least dyspeptic. It was in a big room with [red wall paper, and gleaming electric lights, and a long table that shone with glass and silver, and was littered with food, and had bottles eoming and going from it. And talk and laughter and toasts went about the room, and everything was very merry. And it was curiously interesting to find that there were no lies being told. Most of the talk was of things that happened fourteen years ago. But *it was strangely truthful talk, writes J. H. M. Abbott, in the Sydney "Daily Telegraph." Now the reason for this singular state of things was that that score or so of men had campaigned together in Africa, and had that accurate knowledge of one another that men acquire who have shared hardships and dangers and starvation; and because the conversation was almost wholly confined to experiences they had shared, and of which each of them knew quite as much as the other. It was not that none of them were constitutionally unable to exaggerate a happening, or even to remember things that had not happened. There is no bush-bred Australian who cannot tell a good tale should he wish to —if it is only about a horse, or a dog, or a snake. But it was no use lying to one another of the things they had seen and done together. It would have been foolish. And so they talked with great frankness and keen enjoyment, and the hours slipped away, and the night was all too short. And one sat back in one's chair, and listened and thought, and saw visions of other days in the blue haze of tobacco smoke. There was a mixed drift of eager talk, nearly al-

ways prefaced by the query "Do yoi remember?" And always laughter—except sometimes, where there was al most a sigh, and the quiet nod of < head at the mention of some good mai who had gone down to bullet, or shell or fever. But mostly laughter. Th< lapse of fourteen years made thing: seem pleasanter than they were. A WALKING MIRACLE. Across the table there sat a litth sturdy man, with a queer, wedge-shapec indentation in his forehead. That was whore they had cut away his skull tc get a Mauser bullet out of his brain It was an excellent job, done at Netley Hospital months after he had been shot How well one remembered it! Thai beautiful sunny morning along the Modder River, when, in the glow oi sunrise, the great gun on the shouldei of the purple berg had given us oui baptism of shell fire. AH the world was full of horse-soldiers. One could smell the dew-laden grass, and the saddlery, and the whiff of tobacco, and see the splendid golden veldt stretching foi miles in rolling downs to the blue kopjes on the skyline. And then the long wait, dismounted beside the horses until a staff officer rode up, and ordered forward the battery of horse artillery we were escorting—while up in front over a gentle crest, the crashing, and ripping, and rumbling of rifle-fire gre-w and grew, with the rapping of Maxims in it, and the boom of gun-fire. And then the unforgettable terror that beset one as one rode slowly down the slope—the sickness, and loneliness, and the shame of knowing that in the whole brigade there was only one cur, and that despicable object was yourself 'The awfulness of The First Time! And that driver on the gun team nearest you, who jumped from his saddle, and died on the grass in a mallow of blood, And then the halt among the dropping bullets, with their swish-swish, and the little fountains of dust that spurted up from the ground. And then the "Atom," over there, suddenly saying, "00-o! I'm hit!" He had a round hole in his helmet, and seemed surprised, and you recollect looking at him in wonder and awe, and telling him to. take his helmet off. There was also a heat hole in the middle of his forehead, but he said he was all right. And then, the day after the battle, you remember how the men who went to the field hospital to get his body to give it decent burial, said how they had roared with laughter when they found him walking about,, smoking, with a bandage round his head. But; that bullet *that he wears to-night upon his watch-chain was inside his skull. Good little ''Mighty Atom! ?.' There is a man down the table whose brother: was killed by a shell at Karee Siding—that shell had arrived siid denly in our leading troop and knocked six; of its troopers in a heap, and there is another man "grinning over there whe lay next to you, subsequently, in the firing line during that somewhat strenu ous afternoon. .For a while the bullets had hummed in droves, like swarming bees, just overhead. He had a fine ant heap, to lie. behind, but it was lonely out in the open, and one envied him So when the word was passed down the line to "open out": to a further interval, one hoped to inherit the stronghold. v ->.. "Go on!" one yelled. '''Open out! Open out! " "No fear!" he yelled back, with a grin. "You can go round!" He was always grinning. i . And so one crawled round, remarking bitter things. And it came back- to me; how ali through that day one had munched grains of mealies. There was no food for thirty houTS.-about the time pi Karee Siding. However, that was no thing exceptional. There was once s period of three days. Sir John 'French was a fine cavalry leader, beloved arid

admired by the men who served under him —'but he was a poor caterer. His supply waggons seldom- were within two days of his brigades. MISSING FACES. There was a story to every man there, or his face called up the memory of some story with which he had been associated. And the few that were there reminded eaeh other of the rest who were not—-who lay in scattered graves that were often nameless and unidentified throughout the Orange River Colony, the Transvaal, and Cape Colony; or who were scattered too far abroad in Australasia to meet in Sydney at this annual gathering. Some h*.d disappeared altogether from the ken of their old comrades; a few were dead since the war. One was in gaol. "Absent Comrades," .drunk. . in silence, recalled everything. The days' marches across that wide country, from the dew-drenched or frosty dawns to the late afternoons when shadows of men and horses became long. The farstretching bivouacs, with their rows and rows of picketed horses, their little twinkling fires, their smell of frying) meat. Disconsolate, foodless outposts in the rain, and the loneliness of ''Cossack Posts." Patrol riding in the darkness and sameness of the veldt, with only the stars.to guide. The quick spurts of flame from rifles fired in the night. The wearisome, " tiredness of tobacco-less night marches. The famishing hunger of freezing daybreaks, when there were no rations and no prospect of any. The sleeping in the mud. The commonplaceness of being verminous. There was the smash-up at Zand | River, when some of those...who are j dining here to-night made a forced i march to Pretoria and the barbed-wire prison at the Waterval. There were the two days' battle at Klip River's Berg, the incessant skirmishing and "drawing fire" through the on the Rand, the ambush at Kulkeuvel Nek, the march round through 'the \ Magaliesberg Ranges to the back «f Pretoria, and the release of tWe j prisoners-of-war. There was Diamond] Hill, and Springs, and Carolina and 1 , Belfast, and Barkerton, and there was the pi-siful disaster at Nitral's Nek. There was the place where we got all that mealie-meal near Kroonstaadt.

There was the ; time that the fatj-ier-sergeant-disappeared for two days, and returned laden with jtinned food. There was the occasion when'So : and-So stole the -staff-officer's horsey .and faked the brands with a pair of scissors.' There was -that three days' outpost at Boes l man's Kop, when somebody «lse challenged the straying cow, as it crossed his beat as a sentry, and shot it, and so enabled us to fare sumptuously on fresh meat. There was that Polish Jew's ham-and-egg shop in Pretoria, where you fed for half a crown a time on garbage, and thought it cheap and excellent. There was the Raceedurse Hospital, and the one in the Wanderers' Club grounds at Johannesburg; and Mad' Jack's outside Bloemfontein. There were the ambulance trains, and the pick-me-ups (ambulance waggons),.and the open-truck troop trains. And there was the transport steamer Surrey, that took us to Gape Town. •'Uncle Tom, "the brigadier of the Ist Cavalry Brigade, and "Johnny" S-obe, and "Algy" of the Greys, and a host of well-known characters ■ came up for discussion and reminiscence. And a thousand other things. And it came to the time to go, and nobody wanted to go, because everybody was remembering something that had almost been forgotten, and that it was important should be remembered. But at last, when, the passengers in the streets were becoming fewer and more scattered, and the trams less frequent, and the lights not so brightv-the group on the pavement dispersed, and one came back, to the fact that it was all fourteen years ago, and all over. And so friends said good-night, and they were real Mends. There is no bond of fellowship so strong as that which is forged in war time between those who soldiered together, and are now old soldiers.