THE CAMP LIAR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXII, Issue 100, 9 June 1900, Page 4

THE CAMP LIAR.

The special. correspondent of the Daily News writes from Burghersdorp a learned dissertation, upen " the camp liar," which picturesque entity he " rakes fore and aft." He evidently has a thorough knowledge of the genus. I have sought him (he says) with peace ' offerings in one hand, hoping to beguile him from his sinful ways, and have located him not. I have risen in the chilly dawn, and laid wait for him with a gun, but have not feasted mine eyes upon him. I have lain awake through the still watches of the night planning divers surprises for him, but success has not come nigh unto me. I have cursed the camp liar with a fervour born of long-suffering. What is a camp liar? It is not a man, neither is it a maid, neither is it dog nor devil. It is a nameless shadow, which flits through the minds of men, fashioned by the Father of Evil to be a curse and a scourge to war correspondents. A mining liar is an awful liar, but he takes tangible form, and one can grapple with him when he appears upon a prospectus. A political liar is a pitiful liar, and vengeanee finds him out upon the hustings, and eggs and the produce of the kitchen garden are his reward. A legal liar is a loquacious liar, but he is bounded by his brief and the extent of his fees;' but the camp liar has no bounds, and is equally at home in all languages, at one moment dealing with an army in full marching order and the next battening festively upon one man in a •mudhole. There is no height to which the camp liar daro not ascend, there is nothing too trivial for it to touch, it has neither sex nor shape; but, like a fallen angel ousted from Heaven, and not wanted in Hades, it flits through camps a mental microbe spawning falsehoods into the souls of soldiers. The camp liar concocts a story of a fearful fight, and fills the air with the groans of the dying, and makes a weird picture out of the grisly, grinning silence of the ghastly dead. The kopjes are stained a rich, ripe red with the blood of heroes, and anus, and legs, and skulls, and shattered jaw-bones hurtle through the air, midst the sound of bursting shells, like straws in a stable yard when the wind blows high. The very poetry of lying is touched with a master hand, when charging squadrons sweep across the veldt, and the sunlight kisses the soldiers' steel. Then comes the pathos dear to the liar's soul —the farewells of the dying, sobbed just seven seconds before sunset into comrades' ears; the faltering voice, the tear-dimmed eye, the death rattle in the throat.