SOLDIERS OF MERCY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8377, 25 July 1905, Page 2

SOLDIERS OF MERCY.

A BATTLEFIELD PEN PICTURE (By EDGAR WALLACE in the "Daily Mail.") Sometimes elaborate military organisations fail. Army forms are filled, requisitions prepared, orders signed in accordance with regulations, but there is a hitch. A thousand miles away the rope of routine may have jammed between a colonel's officialism and a subaltern's "enthusiasm, and the tug you give at this end brings no response frojn the other.

When organisation fails in. the Army you depend on the men. After it is all over you say, '" The men were splendid," then go to work to fashion yet another unbreakable system, which will cockle up at the critical moment as sure as Eye ate apples.

Because the men were splendid, t=9" day (May 25) the King is going ' to the top of Gun Hill to unveil a grey granite obelisk to the memory of a few hundred soldiers of the Royal Army Medical Corps who gave their lives for their country. I call them the Corps of Unconventional Heroee, because, as everybody knows who has read his story-book or studied his Chi'istmas presentation plate, the only way for a soldier to die in a war is on the field of battle wtiih a rifle in his hand, and a vision of Ins mother in the top left-hand corner. • About twenty of the corps died this way-— without the rifle — in order that convention should' not be hopelessly outraged, but the remainder diqd unpleasantly and uncleanly of diseases contracted while nursing their comrades. -PROCESSION OF SICKNESS. The Boer war is ancient history. People have gone out of mourning now, and many have married again. We talk familiarly enough of the sacred dead ; we have reached the point where the talk of that dreadful war only conjures up a picture of an increased income tax as its most horrible consequence. Therefore I do not hope to arouse any enthusiasm for these men — good msn they were, poor fellows — who died at their posts, not with the swiftness of they who Had their battle criers „,,.,. To cliesr and charm them to their death,

but slowly, painfully, heroically. From sunrise to sundown they met the constant procession of sickness and suffering that came- to them. They were the pioneers of mercy, they went to places where the Sisters could not go; they, set their tents down on furrowed battlefields and went out with lanterns to glean the harvest of war.

All nirfit long I have seen them, grim will-o'-the-wisps, bobbing over the uneven facve of the veldt, eclipsed in gullies, rising faintly by boulderstrewn kopje:;. They went out erratically, they cam<> back steadily, painfully, slowly, walking step by step and keeping time, and that which they swung between them was a something that 'in the morning had been a laughing, lusty man.

SURGERY BY CANDLELIGHT. They came reeling out of tents in the early hours of the dawn with bloc-d-caked arms and stiff fingers, with aching eyes. ■ With only a guttering candle stuck in the lantern to help them they picked little knives from their velvet-lined cases, as the- surgeons asked for them. There' were fires burning nearer the tents, where a nodding cook niaae coffee. The stragglers came up to the fire, smelling of chloroform,, gulped their coffee, and went back to their work. • • ■ ■ ' They have traditions in the corps of officers and men who 'dashed into the firing line to bring out the wounded: Traditions that embrace the work of an officer who held on to. tie 'femoral artery with his finger and thumb throughout one long, long night and saved his man. But the greatest tradition of all is thai the men of tite Royal Army Medical Corps worked patiently, uncomplaining, in the feverstricken camp at Bloemfontein, working a minimum of eighteen and nineteen hours out of every twenty-four, living with the men they nursed, dying with the men they nursed, and sleeping the last sleep in the dreary graveyard that lies outside the town.: , . Their heroism, their devotion, tneir divine unselfishness cannot be esaggerTr'ito it is to call him -bfeesed who. in the hot passion. of battle or on the impulse occasioned by some sudden dancer lays down his life for another ; but what shall we say of men who saw the death ahead and did not shir*, who had the danger calculated with a: mathematical nicety and did not fen v ? Englishmen, who are proverbially undemonstrative, and who seek from tfc<T trocabulary of snort their superlatives of.eulogy, will sa yi truly and fittingly that they "played the game."