Praise for our Boys.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 9835, 7 August 1900, Page 3

Praise for our Boys.

A Foreign Attache's Opinion.

Sir David Gill, the Astronomer Royal at the Cape of Good Hope, who is on a brief visit to London, asked specially to be introduced to the Agent-General at a dinner recently in order to tell him of the high compliment paid to the N.Z. Mounted Infantry by a foreign attache, who has seen all the mounted men of the British army at present in South Africa, and who witnessed the prowess of the first New Zealand contingent in the Colesberg district. The attache, who is a cavalryman and recognised as a high authority on cavalry, told Sir David Gill that had he to select a cavalry force out of all the British troops in South Africa, he would sooner command the first N.Z. Contingent of Mounted Infantry than any other body of mounted men. The men and horses he said were fine, strong, and intelligent, the men could both shoot and ride, and new over wire fences like birds. New Zealanders will value this opinion as that of an unbiassed expert, who might be expected, if prejudiced at all, to have leanings to the smarter appearance and mote rigid discipline of a regular force of cavalry than to the somewhat go-as-you-please methods of the irregulars. But there is more in the opinion than a mere compliment to New Zealand Mouuted Infantry. It shows recognition by a foreign government of the amount of good soldiering material in the colonies,, and of the value and efficiency of that material when it takes the field. It means that foreign government will be made to realise that the British army no longer consists of Tommy Atkins, a fine fighting machine, but a machine for all that, but that it embraces in case of need the colonial irregulars, mobile and intelligent, able not only to defend their own respective shores but at the disposal of Great Britain in case of hostilities with a foreign power. All that makes for peace between Great Britain and the rest of Europe.