Concentrated Living

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 1235, 26 January 1918, Page 5 (Supplement)

Concentrated Living

the "Adventures and Letters of [sMWp?] Richard Harding Davis," which his /tllfflSuLU brother Charles has edited, the balance is struck, very happily be<ZJ?mL§§> tween "celebrity" talk and exploration and ; war correspondence. Davis once rejoicedj says an ex change, that into a not untypical year he had crowded the Coronation of. the Tsar, the Millennial of Hungary, the inauguration of McKinley at Washington, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, the Cuban rebellion, and the Greco-Turkish war. He resolved to rest after this, but' as the SpanishAmerican War broke out it was a short-lived resolve; The year after that he married; the year after that there came the Boer War; and then there was something of' a lull till the Russo-Japanese war. Of the three wars he, of course; enjoyed the Spanish-American the most, for it wasi spectacular, excited his sense of national pride, and was successful, while he liked the men with whom he was thrown, from Joe Wheeler to Chaffee. He recognised that' we were "amateurs at war," but that didn't matter. His strictures upon the wretched management of American camps and armies were repeated with reference to the British forces a few years later in South Africa,, and here the pity was that the ordeal was a protracted one. After two battles, he had seen, enough of it to i decide him upon returning. "The English irritated me, and I had so little sympathy with them that! I could not write with any pleasure of their work. My sporting blood refused to boil at the spectacle of such a monster Empire getting the worst of it from an untrained band of farmers. I found.l admired the farmers." Yet he speaks with really profound admiration of the British heroes whoiheld out in Ladysmith, though so weak that when relief came they could no* be mustered into line to cheer the parading columns,, but whispered their rejoicings from seats on the curbs.. As for the RussoJapanese war, these'letters, reflect itl as a sorry affair from the correspondents' point of view. Davis and'his fellows were regarded with such suspicion, dogged with such indefatigability, and so effectually restrained by the Japanese from coming within sound "of the guns, that they were filled with bitterness for the island kingdom. Possibly because of the years of trouble which followed upon his estrangement from his first wife, possiblv simply because of the growing weight of years, Davis's rollicking quality was modified a'little as time went on. We see its last generous burst in his letters from the Congo, whither he went in 1007 to investigate the alleged Belgian atrocities. Voyaging up the Congo, he tells us that "what I thought was a hippo on a point of rock turned out to be fifteen hippos in a line! . . . The hippos were delightful. They seemed so aristocratic, like gouty old gentlemen, pulling and blowing and yawning, as though everything bored them." With glee he tells of a hippo he shot on land (he refused to shoot any in water, for they could not be recovered), and which they were so sure was dead that the boys began cutting him up. He "decided he was not going to stand for that, and, to our helpless dismay, suddenly rolled himself into the water."

<r And when he got to London that winter, Davis wrote his mother: "We are settled here in darkest Chelsea, as though we had been born here. lam thinking of putting in my time of exile by running for Mayor." The last letters in this volume concern Mexico and the war which is still raging; they are interesting, and through some of them breathes the most devoted, love for his wife and baby, from whom he was separated; but those from Vera Cruz also betray a cmerulousness that is new.