"POOR EDMOND O'DONOVAN."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 6936, 9 February 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

" POOR EDMOND O'DON OVAN."

Writing on the Soudan catastrophe Mr. Archibald Forbes Bays : —With the expedition ■were two artists, one Alten, a Gorman, the other Frank Viretelly, an Englishman, who represented the Graphic; they are reported alive, and among the prisoners. Not, alas ! reported alive is poor Edmond O'Donovan, the pen of the force, the famous correspondent of the Daily News. For 10 years he and I were colleagnes, yet, strangely enough, we had never met. Perhaps O'Donovan was the most briliant of all the correspondent trouvailles in making which the Daily News has had so good fortune in the course of the last 13 years. MacGahsra excelled him in graphic power of description, but O'Donovan wrote with wonderful lucidity and vigour. Hβ was a man with a weakness of which he himself was so conscious, that he .was always anxious to be outside the spnore of hia special temptation. I have been told that he avowed himself "unfit for civilisation." Anyhow, poor follow ! it is very little he has troubled civilisation for a good many years past. Asia was his field before Africa. In the Ruaso-Turkish war he was with the Russians, for his paper, in Armenia from the beginning till the end of hostilities ; then he drifted away down to the Caspian, and tried to accompany Skobeloff in his campaign against the Turkomans. Skobeloff liked him, and would fain have had him ; but his orders were firm to entertain no correspondent. Any other man would have given up when he was told this definitely ; but O'Donovan did not believe in giving up. He resolved to see the business from the Turkoman side; and there was a delicious coolness in hie farewell message to Skobeloff—" Au revoir at Merv !" Skobeloff never got to_ Merv, but O'Donovan did, and the letters in whioh he narrated his wondorous experience thrilled the world. He aeomed to bear a charmed life, for he not only got to Merv, but returned home to tell the tale. Both in Constantinople, and, later, in London, his unfortunate propensity got him into trouble, and I fear delayed the production of his book so that it fell comparatively flat. In money matters he was a child ; in politics he was a vehement Fenian ; as a correspondent he was unique in cool enterprise, in calm courage, in the abitity to write with admirable lucidity when three out of four men would have been getting ready for death. His address on his Merv experiences to the Geographical Society was a model of condensed, forcible, and picturesque description. No one urged him to.go on this service, in which, he knew he was taking his life in his hand. It was his own proposal. He felt that while he stayed at home he could not refrain from practices which brought him humiliations of which he was mournfully conscious ; and he begged to be allowed to extricate himself from the situation by the expedient of betaking himself to arduous active service where there should be no temptations to forget himself. If indeed he is dead—nor is there, except in hia marvellous fertility of resource, a glimmer of hope that he his alive—what I have ventured to narrate seems to me to lend an added pathos to his fate. It may be said that he has died of the surely not ignoble struggle to save his self esteom. He knew that the service he had chosen was a forlorn hope, As he shook hands with Mr. Robinson, the manager of the Daily News, who had been ever his etauneh friend, he said he thought it was the " final good-bye." Ido not think your readers will be impatent if I quote a few lines from a private letter written by o|Donovan from the El Dnem camp ; they give an insight into the charaoter of the man : — "After to morrow we inarch, and in six or seven days expect to have a sanguinary engagement. All the expeditions whichhavepreceded us during the past two years have been defeated with dieaeters. I hope ours may not eharo the same fate.'' There is an allusion here to the death of a friend—" 1 ahall sadly miss him when I return to London, if I ever do so. lam writing this under circumstances which bring me almost as near to death as it is possible to be without beina under actual sentence of execution, or in the throes of some deadly malady, and yet I speak of poor as if I were going to live for ever. It would be odd if the next intelligence from this part of the world told that I too had gone the way of all flesh. However, to die even out here, with a lance head as big as a shovel through me, will meet my views better than the slow, gradual sinking into the grave which is the lot of so many. Yon know I am by this time, after an experience of many years, pretty well accustomed to dangers of mo.it kinds yet I assure you I feel it terrible to liace deadly peril far away from civilized ideas, and where no mercy is to be met with in company with cravens that you expect to see run at any moment, and who will leave you behind to tace the worst." His next despatch is dated 30th September, from an entrenched camp 30 miles aouth-west of El Duem. There had been another alteration in the plan of campaign, It had been intended to establish a line of fortified ports, some six in number, to secure the line of communication with the advanced base on the Nile at El Duom. But escort work promised to be so arduousand precarious that this intention had been abandoned; and the resolution taken to cut loose altogether from the baee and strike for Obeid with all speed as a flying column, Poor Hicks knew how Roberts had prospered in this expedient in Afghanistan, and perhaps hoped to emulate his old comrade's success. More and more was his movement assuming the character of a forlorn hope. O'Donovan adds —" The camels are daily dying in considerable numbers, but we hope to be able to carry all the biscuit to the end, otherwise, and if grain is not captured, retreat to the Nile will be necesBary. The enemy, 12,000 strong, are reported close by. So far, water has been found mostly on the ground in the surface depressions. There will be no communication with the external world for the next few weeks, as for the moment we practically burn our ships." In a private letter of the same date, he writes :—" The outlook is exceedingly disagreeable ; the prevailing idea is that we are running a terrible riek in abandoning communications with our base on the Nile and marching 230 niilee into an almost unknown country. We march all day," he continues, " from sunrise, and I need not tell you what the heat is here. By the time we have our tents pitched and the entrenchments made, aud by the time we have prepared our food, there is little time left us for sleep." But this was not quite O'Donovan's last message to the journal he served so well. There was still, although '• our ships were burned," one final cockboat to be launched, and to reach port. The last news from the doomed column was despatched by him on 10th October from " Sange Hamforid Camp," 45 miles south-west of El Duem. Thus slowly had the column trailed its length along. "We have halted," he telegraphed, " for the past three days, owing to the uncertainty of the water supply in front. Hare we are entirely dependent on surface pools. A reconnaissance of 30 miles forward yesterday by Colonel Farquhar ascertained that the pools were barely sufficient for a rapid march to the villago of Sarukua, now deserted, where there are a few wells. The enemy is still retiring and swooping the country bare of cattle. The uncnt harvest supplies ample forage. The water supply is the cause of intense anxiety. The camels are dropping. The troops are well." And so ends O'Donovan's work in the profession he adorned.