FACTS OF INTEREST ABOUT THE WAR.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 65, 17 March 1900, Page 1 (Supplement)

FACTS OF INTEREST ABOUT THE WAR.

THE LAST CHRONICLES OF 0. W.

STEEVENS

WHAT HE SAW IN LADYSMITH

(From Our Special Correspondent.)

LONDON, February 2

I make the following short extracts from the final letters of the late George Steevens (which have been appearing in the "Daily Mail" this week), with fullest, acknowledgments to Mr Harmsworth, and regrets that he should have lost such a tower of strength. I disagree, however, with the view that any one man's loss (even Harmsworth's own or Kennedy Jones') could now materially touch the "Mail's" circulation, unless, indeed, through gross mismanagement. However, we shall

see. My view is that when the war is over, and the dull- days come again, people may, and probably will, drop sixpenny illustrated^ and penny dailies, but not their ""Apenny 'Armsworth. It's too good value. STEEVENS AS A WORD PAINTEK. Before giving you Mr Steevens' account of what he felt at Ladysmith. I append a few lines from an "in Memorian" by (I think) Mr Harold Springfield, chief of the ".Mail's" reporting staff, and erstwhile in same capacity on "Star" and "Pall Mall."

near you, swooping irresistibly as if. the devil had kicked it. You come to watch for shells—to listen to the deafening rattle of the big guns, the shrilling- whistle of the small, to guess at their pace and their direction. You see now a- house smashed in, a heap of: chips and rubble; now you see a splinter kicking up a fountain of clinking' stone-shivers; presently you meet a wounded man on a stretcher. This is your dangerous time. If you have nothing else to do, and especially if you listen and calculate, you are done; you get- shells on the brain, think and talk of. nothing else, and finish by going into a hole in the

ground before daylight, and hiring better men than yourself to bring yon down your meals. Whenever you put your head out of the hole you have a nose-breadth escape. If a hundreth part of the providential deliverances told in Ladysmith were true, it was a miracle that anybody in the place was alive after the first quarter of an hour. A day of this and you are a nerveless semi-corpse, twitching' at a fly buzz, a misery to yourself: and a scorn to your neighbour. If, on the other hand, you go about your ordinary business, confidence revives immediately. You sec what a prodigious weight of metal can be thrown into a small place and yet leave plenty of room for everybody else. You realise that a shell which makes a great noise may yet be hundreds of yards away. You learn to distinguish between a gun's report and an overturned water tank's. You perceive that the most awful noise of all is the throat-ripping cough of your own gnus firing over your head at an enemy four miles away. So you leave the matter to Allah, and by the middle of the morning do not even lure, your head to see where the bang eaiue from."'

the sth Lancers. From just beyond them came the tack, tnck, tack, tap.

Tack, tap; tack, tap—it went on minute by minute, hour by hour.

The sun warmed the air to an oven, painted butterflies, azure and crimson, came flitting over the stones; still the devil went on hammering nails into the hills.

Down leftward a black powder gun was popping on the film-cut ridge of I'luebank. A Boer shell came fizzing from the right, and dived into a whirl of red dust, where nothing was. Another — another — another, each pitched with mathematical accuracy into THE SAME NOTHING. Our gunners ran out to their guns, and flung four rounds on to the shoulder of Surprise Hill. Billy puffed [from I'.ulwan —came 10,000 yards jarring' and clattering loud overhead—then flung a red earthquake just beyond the Lancers' horses. Again and again; it looked as if he could not miss them; but tin.' horses only' twitched their tails as if lie were a new kind of fly. The 4.7 crushed hoarsely back", and a black nimbus flung up far above the trees on the mountain.

And still the steady tack and tap— from the right among (lie. Dcvons and

Liverpools, from the right centre, where the Leicester* wcvc\ from the lefl centre, among th GOtti, and the extreme left, from Caesar's Camp.

The light, tacked on six mortal hours and then guttered oul.

From the early hour they began and I he number of shells and cartridges they burned I suppose the I'oers meant to ilo something. But at not one point did they gain an inch.

this quality which makes him so liable to stampede: — The bell-mare may be his tin goddess on lioofs, but even she can be temporarily forgotten once panic terror gets hold of him. Nevertheless, when the stampede is over, though he may have run five miles, or fifty, for that matter, in tlie course of it, his first thought is how to get back to his beloved bell-mare again, and it would surprise anyone how often he manages to succeed in doing so. In the meantime, however, the miehJef has been done, and this liability to stampede on. small provocation is the Avorsfc fault about the mule for military purposes. THE MULE ON THE MARCH. 'For military purposes, however, the mule must have a human guide; but even then he cannot always be relied on: — The liability to a frantic stampede is-vastly reduced when each, animal is thus'under human control; nevertheless, as unfortunately happened at i Nicholson's Nek, that mysterious thrill of panic terror that instantaneously flashes through a whole herd together remains a horrid possibility, it seems a sort of demoniacal possession. When a mule feels that mysterious thrill his one immediate and ungovernable impulse is to break away from the man leading him and run —run —run. And a stout mule, who means to stampede, when he tries to pull away from you,, takes some holding. I have seen, a, mule in the branding corral who has, been Inssooed wrong, the noose being; 100 long and tightening, not, round his throat, but far back close to the shoulders. That mule walked right off with live Mexicans, who all tailed; on and pulled their very hardest against him, but in vain. ' i