FUNERAL OF CAPT. ANDERSON

Grey River Argus, Volume X, Issue 826, 21 March 1871, Page 2

FUNERAL OF CAPT. ANDERSON

At the funeral of Captain Anderson at Versailles there was collected a small gathering of English at the Hotel dn Grand Vatel, where he died on December sth. The deceased had resided as Acting Political Agent at the Court of the Imaum of Muscat, and was rather delicate. The immediate cause of his death was inflammation of the lungs, following on a severe cold. As soon as General Voight Rhetz, the Commandant of Versailles, was made aware that the deceased was a British officer, he ordered that his funeral should be celebrated with military honors. A squadron of the 4th Dragoons, with officers and trumpets, was sent to escort the cortege. The band of the 59th Regiment was on duty, -and played one of those most plaintive, touching, and grand funeral inarches which have been but too often heard in these streets. The coffin of oak, covered with a Union Jack, was borne reverently and with care by a party of dismounted dragoons of the 4th Regiment. At three o'clock the procession started on foot from the hotel for the cemetery, preceded by the band. . The cavalry escort followed; then the coffin and its bearers ; next Colonel Walker, British military attache*, and an officer in the Indian Service ; some visitors to Versailles, some residents, Mr Langdale, Mr Jervis, &c, and a few of the gentlemen stationed here as correspondents for British and American newspapers. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince was represented by his QuartermasterGeneral, Colonel von Gottberg, and one of his personal Aides-de-Camp, the Count Schleinitz, who followed at the head of the procession in company with Gen . Voight Rhetz, Commandant of Versailles. The train of mourners was swelled by a few soldiers,' some French idlers, and by a contingent of the horrid ghouls, male and female, who haunt churchyards, At the entrance to the cemetery the dragoons filed off to the left, formed up, and, as the coffin passed in through the portals, the trumpeters sounded a farewell, which died away as wo passed into the silent streets' of the City of the Dead. There was not a sound except the crisping crackle:, of (the frosted snow under foot,

and the long rows of graves were covered with ice. The grave was waiting for its tenant, new and fresh— apart from the vast pits in which the hopes of so many German homes are buried. The band ceased as the procession arrived at the spot, and Colonel Walker, standing at the side of the pit, proceeded to read with great distinctness and emphasis, portions of the Funeral Service — Prussians, British, and French standing with uncovered heads. There was no funeral volley fired as the coffin was lowered into the grave, but. the solemn boom of a great gun from one of the forts rolled through the air with a long echoing roll, and the soldier was left to his rest. What a wrld-long time it will be ere men's hearts can be purged of that most subtle delusion, as real Republicans esteem it, which casts around one's country such a distinctive life that the death of an unknown countryman in a foreign land will cause us to assemble in sympathetic sadness round the grave of a stranger we have never seen, and invest it with an interest denied to the resting-places hair lowed and dear in the eyes of others !