THE REMINISCENCES OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1673, 30 April 1884, Page 2

THE REMINISCENCES OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT.

I have seen Napoleori "111. at the pinnacle of his hollow splendor. From the German piquet line on August 2, 1870,1 heard the distant cheering on the,' Spicherenberg that greeted him and .....the lad whom he had brought from Metz to receive that day his " baptism of fire,".? ;Agaiii : .lisaw him on ; the morning after Sedan) as the broken man—broken in power, in prestige, in health, in spirits, as he sat with Bismarck ou the grass plot iu front of the weaver's cottage on theDoncliery road. Next morning I witnessed his departure into;his Wilielmshobe captivity. I have seen him doddering about Brighton and strolling under the beach trees that encircle Chiselhursfc Common. And for the last time of all I saw that stolid careworn face, as it lay on the raised pillow of the bier in the broad corridor of Camden Place; and when the face was no more visible, I witnessed the coffin laid down in the little chapel among the. Chiselhurst elm trees. I knew the boy of the Empire when the shackles of the Empire had fallen from his limbs,.' and he was no longer a buckrum creature, but a lively) natural lad. My acquaintance endured into his manhood, When the twilight was falling on the rolling veldt of Zululand,W his day's work in the staff tent wV j done, he liked, as it seemed to me, to gossip with one who knew tho other side of the picture, about the early days about the Franco-German war—a war that had wrought at once his ruin and his emancipation. And finally, poor gallant lad! I saw dimly through tears the very last of him, as he lay there dead on the blood-stained sward by the Ityotyosi river, with a calm, proud smile on his face, and his body pierced by countless assegai stabs. Men have called his death ignoble, Petty as was the quarrel, wretched as was the desertion that wrought to his fate, I call him, rather,"happy in the opportunity of his death. Had 'he lived, what of artificiality, what of hollow unreality might there have been in store for him ! As it was, he had moved in the world a live ghost. ■ Better than this, surely, to be a dead hero—to end the Napoleonic serio-comedy with his young face gallantly to his assailants, 'and his life-blood drawn by the cold steel ! —Archibald Forbes in tho 'English Illustrated Magazine.'