The Sketcher.

Southern Cross, Volume 10, Issue 21, 23 August 1902, Page 12

The Sketcher.

THE LATE WAR. [Prom Abbot’s ‘ Tommy Cornstalk.’] THE WONDER OP DISCIPLINE, i Nobody enjoys being shelled. Everyone would rather be somewhere else. It is no picnic to behold sudden death arriving by the hundredweight. Hardest of all is it to walk your nervous horse, and to keep the intervals and ‘ dressing ’ of the open ranks so that you do not bunch. But just because that cool colonel —who is as a gentle old lady in camp —gives no order and makes no sign, you ride forward, a betterman than in all your life before, because you have learned your lesson ot blind obedience, even unto death. The fear of God is in your heart, but you still ride slowly forward. * * * SOLDIERS AND THEIR SPEECH. - Curiously noticeable in S. Africa were the variations in ‘ English as she is spoke ’ amongst fcbe troops of the Empire. Prom the broad dialects of the men from the different counties of England, and of the Scotch and of the Irish, the speech and accent of the various colonial contingents were strangely distinct. To the newcomer from Canada or Australia, a Yorkshire ‘ Tommy ’ was, at first, almost as unintelligible as a Chinaman. Doubtless the reverse was true also. There were few distinctions in dross as the campaign grew older, and most men looked alike, but one was generally able to locate a man’s habitat in the Empire as soon as he opened his lips to speak. From the rounded, fullvoiced English, the broad Scotch, or the Irish brogue, the Canadian twang, the Australian drawl, was as distinguishable as the French language is from the German. Roughly, the difference is this: The Englishman says all his word ; the Canadian emphasises the last syllable sharply ; and the Australasian slurs the termination. Of nothing was this difference in speech more suggestive than of the wideness of the Empire.

* * THE BOER. However one may wish to do him justice, it is difficult to believe that he possesses the same views with regard to honour and fair dealing as obtained among Englishmen. To be ‘ slim,’ to ‘ verneuk ’ his neighbour is, with the Boer, a by no means bad failing. One does not wish to decry or make little of a people whom one has learned to respect as a brave and hardy race, and a gallant foe, and it is perhaps the most charitable view to take if we assume that the Boer’s ready resort to lying of a bad kind is a flaw in his nature for which he is scarcely accountable, and try and understand that he is sometimes unable to grasp the wrongness of falsity and crooked dealing. According to the Boer mind you don’t get scab in your flock because you have omitted necessary precautions in your methods of sheep-farm-ing, but because you have perhaps stolen a pair of boots when you visited the dorp (town) at Nachtmaal (Sacrament of the Supper), or because you don’t attend JSTachtmaal, or ‘ took down ’ your neighbour over a horse deal when you did. The Boer may be an enlightened, slothful ‘ waster,’ He may not have too well-defined notions as to treachery and guile. He may play the white flag -trick, but he is no coward.