MEMORIES OF THE CRIMEA.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3686, 3 September 1927, Page 1

MEMORIES OF THE CRIMEA.

A VETERAN OF 96 YEARS. In a bed in the Wanganui Hospital there is a cheerful old man of 96 summers, Thomas Shelly, who served in the Crimean campaign, and afterwards in the Maori War. In 1854, Private Skelly, of the Second 25th Bengals, an upstanding young soldier in his early twenties, set out with his comrades to fight the Russians, little imagining the terrrors of the Crimean winter in the trenches below 'Sebastopol. He well remembers the dhy he took the Queen’s shilling, and he can remember even the name of the recruiting sergeant who enlisted him. Lying in his neat bed in a ward decked with flowers, where all the aids of science are called in to comfort the sick, says the Wanganui Chronicle, Private Skelly remembers another hospital—one at Scutari, where pain-racked, broken bodies tossed on straw, and where at night a Lady with a Lamp stole, silent, and softly handed from bed to bed to comfort where she could not heal. But his memories of Florence Nightingale are few. Asked about the charge of the Light Brigade, the soldier said: “There was a mistake . ... A wrong order . . . But I can’t remember now . . . All my mates are dead now . • • They’ve all gone.” Out in New Zealand, Mr. Skelly saw service in the Wanganui district and fought at Nukumaru and Okehu among other engagements. Despite his years he is a happy old warrior, and as his visitors shook hands before they left he cracked a joke.