Whoever can feel the spirit of that cry of satisfaction needs not to be told how just and necessary was the war we were waging. Few of us in the army could probe the sources of the war to their depths. Comparatively few men in England thoroughly grasped the situation. It is all revealed in this shout by Mr. Buxton in THE FRIEND. The long-protracted feud between the two races, the injustice of Boer rule, the sufferings of the British, the threats of the semi-civilised men in power, the past troubles all ending in broken promises or shameful neglect by the British Government--these are all apparent in that cry of delight. The war had not produced such satisfaction. There had been war before, and nothing but humiliation of the loyal Uitlander had come of it. But a decided, firm declaration that the war could only end in British sovereignty--that was news that thrilled the heart of every Anglo-Saxon colonial in the republics and the adjacent colonies.
Other articles and official notices of the first interest or importance were as follows:--
War is grim and fearsome and horrid as we know, or rather as we are being continually told, but nobody seems to have noticed that there is a humorous side to it, and sometimes the spectre Death wears the cap and bells. Up to the present the campaign has not been without its little amusing incidents. In the camp they have been quite numerous, and even on the battlefield itself they have not been unfrequent. The story of a private at Paardeberg who lay behind one of those ever-to-be-blessed antheaps, and contemplating a shattered tibia, exclaimed, addressing the injured member, "Well, you ain't done me badly after all. You 'elped to carry me 'ere, and now you've got me a life pension and free baccy from the parson," has the merit of being true. One cannot refrain a smile at the soliloquy of another private who wished to exhibit a bullet-riddled helmet to his friends at home. He was firing from behind a big boulder on which he placed his helmet. The inevitable shower of bullets followed, but, as has been so often the case with Boer marksmen, not a single one touched the helmet, but one "fetched" its owner in the shoulder, whereupon he took the helmet from its exposed position, and, looking at his bleeding shoulder, remarked, "that comes of cursed pride and nothing else."