THE STORY OF THE SENTRY

Dunstan Times, Issue 882, 14 March 1879, Page 3

THE STORY OF THE SENTRY

All the world has been laughing at Prince Bismarck s story about the Russian Sentry standing in the middle of a lawn. He din not know why he was sent there, the oliicer who sent him did n«t know, nor was the Czar, when questioned, a whit more capable of giving the raison d'etre of that stolid sentinel. It turned out that the Km press Catherine, just a hundred years ago wishing to preserve a snowdrop from bting plucked, set a sentry to watch it. Thi snowdmp faded, euuiine' came, and yet the sen'rv remained, and there he remained for a century. '1 be story is an apt illustration of the mechanical nature at once of the official mind and of Russian mbitarism Bu'. we fear it is all but apocryphal, for a similai tale is told in htlfa-dnzu countries. Foi instance in “■ Ireville’a Memoirs” i is related that a senn y used to stand in one of the corridors of the Foreign Offic;. His only outness w s to request all c oners to •* ke the l« Why they should keep to tin left, or why he was sent to fed them to de so nobody knew. Finally it was discovered tnat many years b foie, "the walls being painted, a soldier was temporarily p-s'eil r.oece ro warn peop’e off me wet pat..t. He hail remaine I—or rather a succession of solders bad-ever since Bur a tale told by General Klinge", oneofGo the’-early friends, s exactly t h e same as Bi-mark’s, only in Klinger’s am edote it was a moss-rose which had been guar led fora century, and the ■awn wa° one in fiont of a German palace instead •da Russian one. But thesevariornm ■ endings of the -ame story do not end there. The Rmp e-s Catherine found her son Paul ■'barged with many thousands of bottles of ■randy As the Prince never touched that liquor she caused an inquiry to he made, and that, when a child, he had on one occa ion ■ eqnire i a glass if brandy as a lotion for an exen ration on his leg From that time a bottle of brandy had been eithersent tohim or char ed to him. Hence the liquor bill. Finallv, not to multiply these tales, not mmv yea s ago some inquisitive persons noticed 'h it year after year the sum of 1.40 was ch raed in the K-timates as the salary of a Bri ish noncommissioned officer in the l.nw count'ies. He found, morenve ; that it ha 1 been charged frs great number of years—indee I, nobolv retne nbere 1 when it was not charged in the Eug'ish Army Estimates. This led to inquiry, when it was discovered that after the battle of Malplaqm’t, fought in 17D9, the D ike of Marlborough left a Seroeant to take charge of some stmes. The Sergeant was in time ft often, but, liking his post, took care not to remind his superiors of his exis'ence, an 1 so continued drawing bis salary to the end of his life, snl h'S children, and grandchildren, and great-grand children di I so after him. We are afraid, however, thatall these good stories must be bracketed as myths.