"TERRIERS" AND TYPHOID.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 50, 8 June 1910, Page 5

"TERRIERS" AND TYPHOID.

DEPARTMENT RECOGNISES NO . LIABILITY. A MISSING BRIGADE ORDER. On Friday we published articles dealing with the refusal of the Defence Department to recognise any liability in regard to the claims made by local members of the Territorials for compensation for loss of wages and expense of medical treatment incurred owing to their having contracted typhoid fever during the manoeuvres at Johnsonville, near Wellington, on the occasion of Lord Kitchener's visit. It was very clearly shown, as the result of enquiries amongst medical men and those present at the manoeuvres that the typhoid must have been contracted there, and it was alleged that the Defence Department was culpable. The matter was brought under the notice of Lieutenant-Colonel Bauehop, officer commanding the district, and he informed a Dominion reporter that "the men in question had drunk from a foetid stream in the vicinity of the encampment in defiance of explicit orders that the only water to be drunk by the men while on manoeuvres was that obtained from the camp water supply and carried in the water-bottles. Under the circumstances the men had no claim against the Department. . The rule with regard to the water was published in brigade orders and duly circulated in camp." Diligent enquiry by a 'News reporter yesterday has failed to discover a single officer in New Plymouth who is at all cognisant of the brigade order. Certainly no copy of this order was given to the officer commanding the Taranaki battalion. The orders received did not deal with water supply at all. The volunteers indignantly deny the remark that the stream was foetid. Tt was a clear running creek, with no suggestion of the microbes which its waters proved to contain.