BRIGADIER-GENERAL BROWN

Otago Witness, Issue 3312, 5 September 1917, Page 21

BRIGADIER-GENERAL BROWN

HIS DEATH AND FUNERAL. A TOUCHING SERVICE. (From Malcolm Ross, Correspondent with the New Zealand Forces in the Field.) NORTHERN FRANCE, June 13. Tho news of the death of Brigadiergeneral C. H. J. Brown, D. 51.0., N.Z.S.C., so soon after his brigade had reached the farthest line in the battle of Messines to which New Zealanders were asked to go, spread quidkly throughout the division, and was received with marked expressions of deep regret. A quiet, unobtrusive man, painstaking, and thoroughly sincere and conscientious, he had already won the respect and the affection of his staff and of his men. He it was of whom I wrote in one of my earlier telegrams that, just after the capture of Messines, he had walked all along his front line and reported everything satisfactory. This he had done in the face of heavy enemy shelling. He succeeded in getting safely back to his headquarters during the day. Next day, while walking at the front in company with other officers, an enemy shrapnel shell burst low overhead, killing him instantly. •

It was a mournful little group of New Zealand officers that subsequently gathered for the funeral. Among those who attended were General Brown's corps and divisional commanders. representatives of the French and Belgian Missions also were present. The body was borne to the grave by a brigadier-general, and nve colonels, the band of a New Zealand regiment playing the Dead March in "Saul." The little procession made its way down a pathway, bordered now by many hundreds of wooden crosses, and gathered around the grave to listen to the beautiful words of the burial service read by the padre, who had slipped a surplice over his khaki. It was a beautiful summer day, the trees were at their best, and the fields were gay with wild flowers. As we went down the narrow path between the crosses with our laden stretcher, other stretchers, empty, were returning down another lane. And all the time the planes came and went, their droning forming a strange accompaniment to the padre's monody. Beside the grave, bare-headed, stood the late 'General's own two sons. It is not often that one could be witness of such a scene on the battlefields of Flanders. Our hearts went out to thorn. Here were theso two young New Zealanders, who had come so many thousands of miles from the < Antipodes, burying their own father within sound of the guns in the battle in which all three had fought. One's thoughts flew back, too, across the leagues of distance to our own land, where the widow and the mother would have the deep sympathy of all whose privilege it was to know the husband and the father, and especially to know the soldier.

And then the final words of the burial service and the bugle notes of "Last Post." beautiful, yet sad, as his comrades laid him in his resting-place. It was a simple soldier's funeral. The two boys took a last look, and tho little procession re-formed and marched / back out of the cemetery. The band marched off to a lively tune. Then Generals and the other officers, and the two sons of the dead warrior, went back to their work, a little more determined, perhaps, to fight on.