GENERAL MAUDE'S DEATH.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXVII, Issue LXXVII, 1 August 1918, Page 3

GENERAL MAUDE'S DEATH.

INCIDENT AT THE BAGRIUD SCHOOL.

In moving the giant to Lady I-,r-v;.]e last March tlie Prime Minister for the first time disclosed the fact that General Maude died th evictim of a cholorainfecte dcup offered as an act of hospitality. An article m the Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia, by Eleanor Franklin Egan, relates the circumstances of this tragic incident. The writer was the guest in Baghdad of the Commander-in-Chief, who insisted on her being inoculated o gainst cholera. "An army surgeon," she says, "came in with his needles and serum, and not only I, but his official household, and everybody present, had to take it. He would have none of it himself, however; in fact, his physician had tried in vain for many mouths to inoculate him. He would not permit it, and his curiously unreasonable excuse was that no man at his age ever got cholera."

Sir Stanley Maude was invited to a performance of .Hamlet given by Arabic children at a Jewish school in Baghdad. It was an occasion of ceremony j representatives of a dozen Eastern races were present in their finest garments, and the women were in bright silk robes, unveiled. "It was the first time," says the writer, "that highclass Baghdad women had ever been known to appear with uncovered faces, and it was a subtle public acknowledgment of the trustworthiness of the British. That was what it was intended, to be.

" 'Under British rule/ said one man, 'our women need never be veiled.'

"A good half-hour was wasted in preliminary courtesies. One person after another came up and greeted the general, and there were numerous introductions. The chief rabbi of the city, a large black-bearded man in long silken robes and a white-and-gold turban, took a seat on the other end of the little platform, and assisted in tho ceremonies, while the headmaster, a typical Baghdad Jew with a French education and old-fashioned French manners, | hovered about and displayed his pleas- | lire in the occasion by much suaA-e gesticulation and main- smiles. Then they brought a small table and placed it before the Army commander and me, on which were two cups, a pot of coffee, a bowl of sugar, and a jug of milk. "Before the recollection of that, one must pause to speculate and wonder. Yet one may speculate and wonder for all time. What can anyone ever possibly know? As I write, General Maude lies dead in a desert grave outside the old North Gate, and they are saying boldly and insistently in the bazaars to-night that he was murdered! He drank the coffee, and he poured into it a large quantity of cold, raw milk. I drank the coffee, too, but without milk. ( When it became certain that he could not live, the doctors asked what he had taken that night, and I told him. They had no suspicions at the time and no thought of anything but of th c overwhelming disaster, but they decided that that was where he probably got the infection. Hcj had cholera in its most virulent form.'' In a. few days Sir Stanley Maude was dead. The writer says there were frequent plots to assassinate the general, and a day or two before she arrived in Baghdad a perfectly arranged scheme had been uncovered by the secret service, with the result* that the schemers got into very serioue difficulties, and the guard surrounding the army commander -was strengthened. There were always sentries posted outside his room. General Maude was oblivious of his own safety where any military object was to be gained. He travelled to and from the lines of defence by aeroplane and up aoid down the river in a glisIseur —a surfaee-sMmindng motor-boat diiven by a huge wind wheel at the stern, which makes from 30 to 40 miles an hour. "His official family," says the writer, "was very much opposed to his flying, but his choice of a way to do anything was always the quickest way, and he did not know what fear was. When anyone made so bold as to protest a,gainst his using an aeroplane, he always referred to a friend of his who 'fell down a little stairway and died of a broken leg.' "

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