A SPY IN LADYSMITH.

Otago Witness, Issue 2408, 26 April 1900, Page 27

A SPY IN LADYSMITH.

Mr Macdonald, special correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald at Ladysmith, in a letter written on December 2 f=ays : — Every night thereafter was one of alarms and excursions. Troops were ordered to be ready to march with three days' rations ; others were told early in the morning to get what sleep they could during the day — a sufficient hint that they might be wanted at night, —yet before morning every such movement was countermanded, and the men went quietly back to bed again. Rumour credited General White with the intention of taking UmbulT/ana or some of the southern guns in a- night rush with the bayonet, so that the road might be opened for the relieving troops. The capture of both positions was necessary to complete communication.

The staff did not, of course, take war correspondents into their confidence as to their reasons for altering their plan of action, but it was assumed that the cloud message from Colenso had something io do with it, while a still more sensational reason for abandoing the coup was soon afloat. One of our own. men had been shot that same night while in the very act of lamp-signalling our movements to the enemy. A change of sentries had just taken place, and the soldier fresh on duty is at the outset always more alert and suspicious than the tired-out sentinel he relieves. This man paw something suspicious on his front, so crex^t up, and having satisfied himself that a traitor was at work, shot him through the shoulder. That the menage reached the enemy there could be no doubt, for early next morning our outposts saw the Boers in thousands leaving an ambush from which they would have had our troops at their mercy had the Light Horse, as was intended, tried to break through this pass to join General Clery. The traitor turned out to be a Cape boy named Ventor, who had been attached as a mule-driver to the Tenth Mountain Battery of Artillery. The significance of the connec tion at once excited suspicion. It was the mules of the Tenth Battery which stampeded at Nicholson's Nek when Colonel Carleton's column was cut off and the Gloucester Regiment taken, and it is said that the half-caste was surprised into betraying the fact that he ha-J something to do with it— having first, no doubt, betrayed the movement of our men to the enemy,— and so led to the concentration of the commandos which so effectually overpowered us. There is short shrift for a traitor in war time. By noon next clay the gallows was building in the gaol yard, though it seemed almost a pity that the man could not have been hanged in olden fashion in the high streets as a warning to the spies with which the town swarms.