A GREAT WARRIOR.

Northern Advocate, 22 February 1911, Page 3

A GREAT WARRIOR.

An unobtrusive paragraph which is being circulated in New Zealand announces that General Piet Cronje is dead. in the old days British people often wished him dead, but are sorry enough now, we suppose (says the Taranaki "Daily News." He was a man who combined in his unbeautiful self the "slimness" of his countrymen, the dogged persistence ot a Napoleon, and the disciplinary force of a Kitchener. He was stub-

born and religious, brave and gentle, ''harsh at times, ignorant as to scholarship, but unerring as to instinct. He was the bitterest fee the British

ever had in South Africa, and there is no question in the.mind of anyone who understands the spirit of the true old dopper that he was Britain's foe to his deathbed. There are reasons enough for the British military hatred of this uncompromising old Huguenot. He was the genius of the 1880 war, and the farmer troops he commanded at Doornkop and Majuba Hill slaved for him and loved him, even though his ready "sjambok" drove them to the fray. It was Cronje who besieged PotchefStroom and kept the garrison in ignorance that an armistice had been declared and made it capitulate. It was he who carved up a British force at Bronkhurst bpruit, one of the most terrifying and dramatic episodes of a woeful business. . . . There was no hope for the 'rooibatjes' at any moment of the fight - and the grave at Bronkhurst is a very big one, and there are two nurses in it besides the piles of men. Cronje was a better soldier than Jameson, and proved it at Krugersdorp, where he smashed the silly raid. It was this curious old person who attacked Kimberley in the latest war, was repulsed and swept down to the Modder river, where he punished Methuen. It was Cronje who engineered the dreadlul battle of Magersfontein. When French raised the siege of Kimberley (and the New Zealanders were the first troops into the diamond city) Cronje pushed away to the east and entrenched his army alongside the Modder river. Here he was hemmed in on all sides, and Paardeburg was a shambles of the most dreadful description.