EMINISCENCES OF CAPTAIN OATES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1145, 13 September 1913, Page 4

EMINISCENCES OF CAPTAIN OATES.

In the Coinhill Magazine for April, Major G. F. Alacinunn tells, very graphically, the story of Captain. Oates’ fight with the Boers. He says it may be called “The talc of the Boy Dragoons.”

“Early in 1901 Kritzinger and Schuipers, two daring young Boer leaders, had remained in the mountains of Cape Colony with a following when the first great l)e Wet hunt had passed by. Colonel Charles Parsons, with a column, hastily got together, of Royal and Australian Artillery, the Sharpshooters, Imperial Yeomanry, and some sixty recruits on their way to join the Inniskillings, was following them up. With this dragoon detachment was Oates, a cheery lad, just commissioned, to whom war was one vast holiday.

‘‘Arriving at Aberdeen Hoad by rail from "Willow-more, the first train-load (with which was the writer) hastily pushed on hy road towards Aberdeen some, eighteen miles, to relieve the town itself, as a message had arrived at tile station to say that the eommando was then entering the town. "With this train-load were the dragoon recruits. Alter a sharp strap outside the town, this party bivouacked till the remainder of the column marched into the little wattle-and-dab town, some time alter dark. Next morning three patrols of some twenty men eaeh were sent out to find the eonimamlo. They had not far to look. Now a patrol of that size has many disadvantages. It is too small to put up a successful fight, it is too large to escape observation. The first patrol, that on the left, was driven in, helter-skelter, on its own squadron and guns. The centre patrol was captured. The third, on the far right, consisted of hoy Oates and Ids twenty recruits. For some time nothing was heard of them. Then, away iii the veldt from across the blue shimmering scrub, came, faint yet distinct. the ‘tic-toe’ of the rifle, single hut regular tiring. ‘Tie-toe, pae-boe,’ steady and precise. Presently a couple of stray dragoons turned up, with rifles and empty bandoliers, and then another, and all Hie while Lee-Metford was answering Mauser away in the camoel-dorn scrub. Away to the northwest, perhaps four miles out, Oates and his patrol had run into the brethren. Dismounting to fight in a spruit, lie found he could not get away and his horses were slipt down; so ho had settled; to a fire fight at close quarters, and had indignantly rejected all summons to surrender, to which had been added a threat of ‘no quarter.’ Then, as the ammunition ran out, men with empty bandoliers bad been told to slip away down the spruit. Oates himself was said to be wounded. “More dragoons came straggling in with their arms, and the firing died away. Filially the spruit was reached and what had happened was this: Boy Oates and his boy dragoons had remained firing, sending away the_ ungrounded men when their ammunition was finished, until not a round of ammunition nor au unwounded man was left, and then tho Boers crept in to take their prize. It was not a very satisfying capture. Tho officer lay wounded, surrounded by half a dozen or so of his comrades in like ease, a few mortally so. The horses were dead, most of the rifles were gone and the bandoliers were empty, and the chagrin of the brethren was only equalled by their admiration for the ‘Khakis.’ Giving such first, aid as they could, the Boers then left them to be picked up by their own column. “Such, in brief, is the talc of the boy dragoons, and it shows how the metal had rung true from the beginning in the man we mourn. It was' a fitting gambit iff a groat game, “But as we pay tribute to tho memory of Oates, the dragoon and faithful eomardo, let us realise that we do so as much to Oates the type as to Oates tho individual. Let ns remember that as he died in self-sacrifice, so die the English, and no doubt others—away from the limelight—every daj f that the sun sets in the Atlantic. In the smelting furnaces, in the factories, in tho coalfields, in the coastwise trade-., while the landsman sleeps o’ flights, the English men and women die to save others. Let those that read of it pray that they'in their time may be endowed with the strength to do likewise. That is the thought for us as we ponder in our armchair ou that set figure disappearing into the unknown waste of snow, to, let ‘the spirit return to God who gave it.’ ”