THE DANGERS OF THE SLOUCHED HAT.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 64, 16 March 1900, Page 2

THE DANGERS OF THE SLOUCHED HAT.

Mr Fred Villiers, most vivid of all pourtrayers of battle scenes, gives a splendid description of Colonel Pilcher's successful raid on New Year's Day, in which the colonial troops distinguished themselves so greatly. It ■ was nearly being the last thing Villiers did; but for his own presence of mind he would have been shot down by one oil the Queensland scouts, who mistook him for a Boer owing to a dilapidated slouch hat he was wearing. Describing the occurrence, Mr Villiers says: "I looked at him for a moment and saw his rifle about coining to the 'read}-,' when I threw up my hands. As he came up, covering me, he grimly smiled as he said: 'Why, I look you for a blooming Boer.' The hat 1 wore was certainly suggestive of the enemy, for it was a much-worn wideawake. So I stepped down behind the bank, but three other keen Queenslanders had seen the action and rode up at the gallop and were about to take me prisoner, when ray old friend, Major De Rougemont, riding up with his interpreter to interview the prisoners, discovered who I was, and I retired to the farmhouse, resolving to commandeer another hat whenever the opportunity served." The City Imperial Volunteers have all gone out with the wideawake hat, but it is to be hoped that Lord Roberts will provide them with helmets in lieu thereof. We can't afford to take the risk of our men potting at each other on the strength of misleading headgear. MET BKFORE. "Fighting Mac," as Colonel Hector Macdonald is affectionately called, I has no false modesty on the score of his "beginnings" in the army, and gave j evidence of the fact at the Marlborjougii Club soon after he came home j "brave victor from the fray" at Omdurman. The Prince of Wales had expressed a desire to meet the Sirdar's right-hand man in the smashing of the Khalifa's army, and when the j brave Highlander was presented reimarked: 'It is a curious thing, Colonel : Macdonald, that we should never have .met before." "Pardon me, sir," re- | plied the Scot, "may I say that we I have?" "Indeed, and when?" queried | the Prince, who prides himself on 'never forgetting a face. Colonel Macdonald half stood to attention, and then astonished the group of gilded generals and equerries by remarking, with a smile, "I was corporal of the guard the day your Eoyal Highness landed in Bombay." A BELATED LADYSMITH DIARY. A correspondent of the "Daily j Chronicle,", who has been shut up in Ladysmith, has managed to g-ef through the enemy's lines, after two .attempts, part of his diary of the siege. Some of the items are amusing. ; Waiting on November 11th he says: "It would be a good thing if the army ; could be marched through Regentstreet as the men look this morning. It would teach people more about war than a hundred pictures of plumed horsemen and the dashing charge. The smudgy khaki uniforms, soaked through, and through, stained black and green and dingy red with wet and earth and grass, the draggled great , coats, heavy with rain and thick with mud, the heavy sopping- boots, the blackened, battered helmets, the blackened, battered faces below them, unwashed and unshaved since the siege began, the eyes heavy and bloodshot with sun and rain and want of sleep the peculiar smell—there is not much brass band and glory about us now. . . . To-day Long Tom's shells were thrown pretty imich at random about the town. One blew a mule's head off close to the bank and disembowelled a second. One went into the 'Scotch House' and cleared the shop. A third pitched close to the Anglican Church and brought the Archdeacon out of burrow. But there was no real loss, except that one of the Naval Brigade got a splinter in the forehead. My little house had another dose of shrap- ■ nel, and on coming in I found a soldier ! digging up the bits in the garden; ;but the Scotch owner drove him away jfor 'interfering with the mineral I rights.' " THE BOERS EIGHT HOURS' DAY. On November 12, he writes: "The Boers conduct this siege with real consideration and gentlemanly feeling. They observe the Sabbath. They give up quiet nights. After a violent bombardment they generally give us at least one day to calm down. Their hours for slaughter are six to six, and they seldom overstep them. They knock oft" for meals—unfashionably I early, it is true, but it would be petty |to complain. Like good employers, ;they seldom expose our lives to danI get for more than eight hours a day. ; They are a little capricious, perhaps' i m the use of the white flag. At the beginning of the siege our Lady Anne killed or wounded some of Long Tom's gunners, and damaged the gun, where•upon the Boers hoisted the white flag over him till the place was cleared and !he was put to rights again. It was the isort of thing schoolboys might do. Captain Lambton complained that by i the laws of war the gun was permanjently out of action. But Long- Tom goes on as before. I think the best ; story of the siege comes from a Kaffir who walked in a few days ago. In the Boer camp behind Pep'worth Hill he had seen the men being- taught bayonet exercise with our Lee-Metfords, captured at Dundee. The Boer has no bayonet or steel of his own, and for an assault on the town he will need it. Instruction was being given by a prisoner—a sergeant of the Royal Irish Fusiliers — with a rope round his neck!" THE KINDLY BRITISHER. And the following day's addition contains this amusing passage:—"Yesterday the Boers, with fine simplicity, sent to our ambulance camp for -some chlorodyne, because they had run short of it, and were troubled with dysentery like ourselves. Being a kindly people we gave them what they wanted, and a little brandy besides. The British soldier thereupon invents the satire that Joubert asked for some forage because his horses were hungry, and Sir George White replied: 'I would very gladly accede to your request, but have only enough forage myself to last for three years.' So the day passed, and we did not lose a single man. Yet the enemy must have enjoyed one incident. I was riding up to spend an hour in the afternoon with Major Chnrcher at Range Post, when on an open space between me and their little camp I saw a squadron of the 18 th Hussars circling and doubling- about as if they were practising for the military tournament. Almost before I had time to think, bang came a huge shell from Puffing Billy, just above my

head, and pitched between me and 1 them. Happily, it fell short, but. it : gave the Dutch gunners a wonderful display of our cavalry's excellence. Even before 1 could come up men and i horses had vanished into air." ! BOER TEASING. His diary concludes thus: "'.Justafter midnight, November 14th, a very unusual thing happened. Each of the Boer guns fired one shot. Apparently they were trained before sunset, and fired at a given signal. The shells woke me up, whistling over the roof. Most of the townspeople rushed, lightly clad, to their holes and coverts. The troops stood to arms. But the rest of the night was quiet. Apparently the Boers, contrary to their character, had only done it to annoy, because they knew it teased us." A WHITE FLAG INCIDENT. i The virtuous persons who continue to assert their disbelief that the allegations against the Boers of misusing the white Hag will be somewhat puzzled to get 'over the case of Mr Knight, the able correspondent of the ''Morning Post," who was "knocked out" by a sporting Mauser bullet —a much larger missile than the ordinary Mauser military rifle bullet—at Belmont. Mr Knight was landed in Eng- , land last Saturday minus his right I arm, worn to a shadow with fever, | and looking older by twenty years ■than when he said au revoir to his , brothers of the pen in Fleet-street a | few months ago. Mr Knight thus de- ; scribes how he came by his wound:— [ "Just at the close of the battle a small party making a last stand hoisted the. white Hag. We went forward, were fired on, and 1 dropped. A private next to me, one of the ; privates of the party I. was with, said ' grimly. 'All right, sir, I'll come back and see to you in a. few minutes, when ; we've finished with these gentlemen.' Then he went on with the rest, and five minutes later the last. Boer had been bayoneted. There was no quarter, t can tell you. Our men weren't pleased at being fired at after the Boers had hoisted the white flag. When Tommy came back, grinning all over his face with satisfaction, his bayonet was dripping with blood of the Boers he'd killed, and, dripping as it was, he promptly set to work to dress my wounds with its aid." Mr Knight takes his loss philosophically. After all, he having one arm has its advantages; it's economical. He had his right arm taken off, and j Major Dalryinple lost his left arm, Iso when they fjaund they wanted i gloves they bought one pair between 1 them. ' IN HOSPITAL. i A military nurse, apart from the I professional interest in the cases | brought to her care, is in a good position to acquire considerable insight into the real character of that, .at present,, very popular person, T. ' Atkins, Esq., of the British Army. At , Maritzburg there are, alas! hundreds 'of "Tommies" to be studied. They ,! are representative of every town aaid • hamlet in Great Britain and Ireland, , and differ in speech and general cha- \ racteristics as much as it is possible ■ for children of a common stock to ; differ. Yet they are alike in one thing, their childlike faith in British j superiority, The Boers may win j battle after battle, but the private ! soldiers does not accept the reverses 'as an indication of the enemy's suj periority. "We'd a gin 'em a fair doin' jif they'd (the officers) 'ad let us gone i on. We, wuz raight on top of 'cm when we wuz ordered back—an' that arter ben shot dahn loike ship as I us wuz climbin' them 'ill." j "Blirne, but it was a bit orf! Got rite hup to the beggars,and then cos the bloomin' artillery wasn't there Iwe was told to go back—just as we'd j got 'em by the scruff." \ "We was told we'd got to take that ■ 'ere kopje, and we'd a done it. Lost j half our men? Well, y' didn't expect Ito git there easy, did yer?There was enough of us left to etea.r out the Boers if they'd been twice as many j wunst we got at 'em with • the sticker. One bloomin,' Boer be'ind a rock is good as two of us in the open, but let us git in among 'em, and blimey one of us is good for any ten of 'em." "Can't understand it a bit. I know we can do them over, but somehow we never seem to get a fair show. We got 'em properly at Willow Grange, and sent 'em filying* like rabbits." "We'll git satisfaction some day. Nurse says I'm going on a treat, and will soon be ready for the front again, but our Generals will have to let us keep at it till we get right into them. It's no good going for a position if you're going- to be beaten because half your men go down. 'Course the Boers have it all their own way to begin, with that's natural. They're out of sight, and pot you from behind rocks, but once we get up to them we get it our way, and can level up killing scores and a bit over. That's how I look at it." Tommy's idea, as shown by these scraps, taken at random from, a nurse's note-book, is evidently, in spite of the terrible lessons of the war, to go right ahead losses notwithstanding until the bayonet can pay back the rifle fire debt. What he wants is a definite object to be fought for and attained, no matter the cost. The one prevailing idea of the soldier in the hospital is to get patched up and returned to the field. He makes an excellen Jpatienjt, unfcoin plaining and trustful, doing what he is told like an obedient child, The penalties of warfare he easily and good-na-turedly accepts as part of the day's work. Just a bit of chaff, and that is all. "When them doctors get to hitching- off arms and legs there's no holding1 'em; they're just a bit too handy like over these 'ere jobs." "They want to be even with the Boers."