LETTER FROM A LADY REFUGEE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XII, Issue 5057, 7 March 1900, Page 2

LETTER FROM A LADY REFUGEE.

From a number of extracts from a letter written by a lady refugee from Johannesburg to her brother, Mr 6. G. Blead, we clip the following : — Claremont, Near Capetown, 20bh January, 1900. I try to be brave and nob give way, for I am " the mother of a soldier now," as a kindly gentlewoman who it ataying here, the wife of a captain, the daughter of a colonel, and a sister of another captain, in the Imperial Army all of them, iaid to me, as she took both my hands in hers the night I broke down when I heard the news that my boy had been sent to th-J front. She said she was envious of me and she wished her husband would cptne in then from the Qaatle, where he is engage 1 on certaia military duties almost night and clay, and tell her he had been ordered to the front, as he was dying to g". Since then she has had news of the death of her brother, Captain Sandford, who was killed at Mafeking. £ have not seen her since, as she was ill is bed when the tidings came and the shook haa prostrated her so much that she is cols able to see anyone. The news should not have been told to her in her critical state, but leaked out as Buch things will. But I never wish to see such uient grief as her father's. Some one with me had heard Capfeaio Sandford was wounded, and on seeing Colonel Sand ford hoped he had not had very bad news of his son. I had heard nothing of it, but I knew the worst when si looked in the set, white, grim, face of the poor old man, and saw the olerohed hands with the whitened knuckles standing out, aa he aaid, ■ "Dead, dead, only a telegram." I turned to him and put my hands on his—they (hit hand*) were like ice that hob summer evening—as I said, <( I did not know of it. How awful all this jb," and after a few more words I left him, as it was kinder than to stay. His son, on the others being ordered to the Cape, got leave and came from India, where he was stationed,, to spend it here, and on war breaking out joined the Protectorate Regiment at Mafeking, where ha was shot on December 26th, but the news did not reach here until long after. These things bring the gruesome side of war horn* to us, for although I did not know Captain Sandford I knew of him from his people. His father had received one letter only from him from Mafeking, and had told me he would read it to me as it was so interesting, but some-how ib never was read, and the next) news wm this telegram, and sinoa then nothing, only the meagre newspaper details. How splendidly your New ZeaJanders have behaved. What a glorious feeling of loyalty the colonies have shown to our dear Mother Country. Never has there been anything like it in the history of the world. I see by the papers New Zealand is going to ■end another contingent. 1 feel so anxious for fear your boy should join. He has an ancle and several cousins at the war; surely/ that is sufficient*