ANOTHER EMPIRE POET

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 11 September 1901, Page 2

ANOTHER EMPIRE POET

The South African war is likely to bring prominently before the public another pressman gifted with poetic genius of the Kipling style. It is none other than Mr. Edgar Wallace, whose trenchant letters in the Daily Mail on the Vlakfontein outrages have caused so much attention. Some time ago Mr. Wallace was a private in the Royal Array Medical Corps at Simonstown, where he met a brother of Mr. H. W. Wilson, the famous naval expert. In the course of conversation, young Wallace mentioned that he had written some poems, and Mr. Wilson offered to read them. They were striking verses in the Kipling Barrack-room Ballad style. Two of these were sent Home, one to the ‘ Pall Mall Gazette ’ and one to the ‘ Evening News,’ which were both subsequently published. The editor of the ‘Evening NeWs’ then invited Mr. Wallace to write some more, and accordingly he contributed to that paper regularly for a year while he was in South Africa. When hej returned to England he was invited to send to the ‘ Dai y Mail' some letters from Africa, whence he was journeying on private badness, which would necessitate his absence from England for two months. He landed at Capetown, and found the war in South Africa was raging fiercely. The '‘Daily Mail’ commissioned him to go up to the front as its special correspondent, and as such his name is now well known. Recently a volume of Mr. Wallace’s poems entitled “ Writ in Barracks” was published, and in the colonies will be eagerly looked for. As a specimen of realistic pen picture of the horrors of war, the following may be quoted : The clink of a stopper and glass ; A sigh as the chloroform drips; A trickle of—what? on the grass, And bluer and bluer the lips. The lashes have hidden the stare. . . .

A rent, and the clothes fall away. . . . A touch, and the wound is laid bare. . . . A cut, and the face has turned grey. . . And it’s War! “ Orderly, take it out. It’s hard for his child, and i'.’s rough bn his wife, There might have been—sooner—a chance for his life. But it’s War! And—orderly, clean this knife! ”