REVOLUTIONARY HERO.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18990, 11 October 1923, Page 5

REVOLUTIONARY HERO.

GENERAL LEE CHRISTMAS AN ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT. CENTRAL AMERICAN REVOLTS. A first-class fighting man is dying—dying in a bod in Now Orleans, and not ' with his hoots on,” as such a fighting man would like to die. General Lee Christmas, first “soldier ol fortune” and the “clay” of the late Richard Harding Davis's famous novel of adventure, is nearing tho end of the trail. His mind la as keen and active as ever, bait Nature is exacting its 101 l at least from a body that has withstood for (JO years such hardships and injuries as the corporal beings of few men ever were called upon to endure. Men who have known Christmas all tho best years o£ !us life smile at the suggestion that the “General” could be afraid of anything—even a slowly creeping death. They have seen him face a hail ot bullets without batting an eye; they have seen hinwenter a room filled with armed men and threatening enemies with a weapon no more deadly than a riding whip; they have seen him lead his soldiers through a swamp, supposedly impassable, to grapple, hand to hand, with foes of superior numbers who were pouring a murderous fire upon them from the farther bank. Christinas was a locomotive engineer in younger days, and might be yet but for the strange turn of fate which transformed him into a Central American revolutionist literally overnight. The writer mot General Christmas for tho first time at Porto Costez in Spanish Honduras early in February, 1011, after he had fought the victorious battle of Laceba, iu which the swamp incident occurred and which encompassed the overthrow of President Davit la and the the elevation of Manuel Bonilla to the Presidency. From the general's own lips we heard how Christmas happened to become a revolutionist. FORCED INTO REVOLT. 'T was engineicing on (hr Honduras railroad running 40 miles into tho interior back in 1887,” said the general. “One night 1 had brought a train load of bananas into port to be loaded on the waiting ship so she could get away before dawn. I had just turned in about 3 o'clock when there was a knock at my door, and I got up to find a crowd of excited natives, all armed, demanding that 1 get into my clothes and take them to the end of the island, and across the trestle, so they could make an attack at dawn on the cuartel, or governing garrison, that lay just at the other end of the mainland. I protested that I didn't want to got mixed up in any of their revolutions, but they threatened to shoot me unless 1 went along with them, and the cold barrels cf a couple of rifles pressed against my middle convinced me thev meant business. So in the end I started my' engine back up tho island with the flat cars behind leaded with chattering revolutionists. _ “Dawn was breaking ns I got to the trestle. The Government soldiers must have got wind of tho thing because they were streaming across the bridge in droves, JUST OPENED THE THROTTLE. “What did you do, stop the train?” “Stop nothing! I just opened tip the throttle as far as she would go and ploughed into ’em. I got 27 of ’em. And I have been in the revolution business ever since.” Fourteen years had passed. Guiteraz had been elevated to the Presidency through the success of the revolution, and Christmas was attached to his military staff. Later he was made chief of police of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and as such was an officer in 'the national army, acquiring military training which he afterwards put to good use in leaning revolutionary forces in practically all of the Central American countries. There is nothing bloodthirsty or mercenary in Christmas’s nature; he was actuated by sheer love of adventure, and never conceded there was anv moral wrong in taking life in a fair fight. Ho really preferred fighting on the side of the under-dog, and the fact that he never had any money to speak ot otters convincing proof that he was not in the fighting game for what he could get out oi 1 Usually he did the fighting, and tho native politicians and their backers —persons interested in rich banana land concessions—reaped the benefit.