News, Notes and Cuttings.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 62, 14 March 1900, Page 2

News, Notes and Cuttings.

(VIA ENGLAND). i BULLER'S AND METHUEN'S DIS- , PATCHES. j SEVERE CENSURE ON THEIR TONE SLANGY OR FRIVILOUS. Whilst England in deepening consternation awaited explanations of the incredible muddle of Spion Kop, the belated official despatches by Buller and Methuen regarding earlier phases of this humiliating campaign were published, and a.ffctrdcd 'Saturday's papers ample food for "smashing" leader.. on our gallant generals. Nearly all the principal organs are particularly severe on a sentence of Bullenos in a covering letter to Col. Miles. Here it is: "I suppose our officers will learn the value of scouting in time, but, in spite of all one can say," up fo this our -men seem to blunder into the middle of the enemy and suffer accordingly." The "St. .lames' T' does not quote these words for any dignity or value they nave in them- | solves. Neither (says it and also the j "Daily News") "do we select them as i examples of the tone which a. British j officer holding a great command, and j responsible for (he lives of thousands, to say nothing of the honour of his I country, ought to. take in official j papers meant for publication. Quite the reverse. We pick them out because they supply an example of a kind of academic frivolity which may seem admirable to a certain type, but which is not uncommonly found in combination with considerable practical inI capacity We do dot deny ' that remarks of this kind may be found in the correspondence of the Duke of Wellington—in his private letters. He said there was nothing so stupid as a gallant officer, but that was when he was writing to his brother, and not for publication. When he had to comment on the hot-headedness of unthinking lieutenants of cavalry, or the incompetence of commanders of battalions, he took another tone. He made it very clear that he was in earnest, and his sentences cracked like the huntsman's whip. When work was ! to be done he could be grimly in earnest. To judge by these despatches, the ; present generation of our officers is far too superior to imitate the Duke's j middle-class gravity. A shrug of. the > shoulders, a supercilious smile, seem I to them proper for all occasions, and they write of their battle and defeats J in a tone which hovers between the! slang of the smoking room and the ! light touch and away of conversation at an afternoon tea party, which no well bred man would think of boring bjr pedantic gravity. But, most unfortunately, it is not only Sir R. Buller who lapses into superfluous sneering when he ought to rebuke. The despatches display to our admiration the ; figure of Lord Methuen, who is so full I of the light stoicism of the paper \ classes, that he fills his reports to his Government with the slang and the humour of Mr Rudyard Tvipling's subalterns. We learn from him that a detachment of the Scots Guards has been "wiped out." One almost wonders that His Lordship did not. arid that the enemy "had given them beans." lie might almost as well have said that __£ have written tlifc following little para- J graph of slang and gossip in his dcs- j patch of the 28th November. 'All evidence tends to show that at 2 a certain number (viz., of the Boers) be- I gan to clear, and that at 4 a good I number more moved off; that the leaders lunched in the hotel I am now writing from, and were utterly disheartened at our stubbornness. I expect one more fight at Spyfontein will convince a great number of the Orange Free Staters that it is better not to continue fighting." This is the style of a newspaper correspondent whose liberal education hafe been in the works of Mark Twain. Within a. week or so these Free Staters had helped to give Lord Methuen on exemplary thrashing. That he courted it we do not deny—but, alas! the blows, the wounds, the useless deaths fell upon the officers and men of the Highland Brigade." . The "Pall Mall" and "Mornmg Post agree that "As to these despatches it is not too much to say that they form a compendious collection of things which, in a campaign of this kind, ought not to be done. In fact their j' teaching may be summed up in the single word "Don't.