A BRAVE BRIGADIER.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 August 1917, Page 8

A BRAVE BRIGADIER.

HIS SONS PESENT AT HIS BURIAL ■{From Captain Malcolm Ross, Official Correspondent with the New Zealand Forces at the Front.) Northern France. .Tune 13. The news of the death of BrigadierGeneral C. H. J. Brown, n'Z.S.C.. so soon after his brigade bad reached the farthest line in the battle of Messines to which the New Zealanders were asked to go, spread quickly throughout the division, and was received with marked | expressions of deep regret. A quiet, tin- | obtrusive man, painstaking, and thoroughly sincere and conscientious, he lie already won the respect and the affection of lis staff and of his men. lie it wa.i of Khom I wrote in 01c of my earlier telegrams that, just alter the capture of Messines, be had walked all along his front line and reported everything satisfactory. This iie had done in tiie fice of heavy enemy shelling. He succeeded in getting safely back to his headquarters during the day. Next day, while walking at the front in company with other ollieers. an enemy shrapnel shell burst low overhead, killing him instantly. It was a mournful little group of New Zealand ollieers that subsequently gathered for the funeral. Among those who attended were General Brown's corps and divisional commanders. Representatives of the French and Belgian J[istions were also present. The body was borne to the grave by a brigadier-genera! and live colonels, the band of the New Zealand regiment playing the Dead March in Saul. The little procession made its wav c'owu a pathway, bordered now by many hundreds 01 \v<wu.-u crosses, and gathered aconnd the grave to li-ten to the j beautiful words of the burial service read bv the padre, who had slipped a surplice [ over his khaki. , it vas a. beautiful summer day. the | trses were at their 'best, and the fields i were 4-av with wild flowers. As we ' wont di'wu tiie narrow path between the crosses wrth our laden stretcher, other stretchers, empty, were returning down another lane. And all the time the planes came and went, their droning forming a Strang*'- 1 accompaniment to the j.-adre's monody. Beside the grave, bare-headed, stood tin? late General's own two sons. It is not often that one coul'l be witness of such a scene 011 the battlefields of Flanders. Our hearts went out to them. Here were these two young New Zealanders who had come so many miles from the Antipodes, burying their own father within the sound of the guns in r the battle in which all three had fought I One's thoughts, too. flew back across the leagues of distance to our own land where the widow and mother would have the deep sympathy of all whose privilege it was to know the husband and the father, and especially to know the soldier. And then the fina'l words of the burial service and the bugle notes of the "Last Post,'" beautiful yet sad, as his comrades laid him in his last resting-place. "No useless coflin enclosed his breast ': it was a simple' soldier's funeral. The two boys took a k%st look, and the little procession re-formed and marched back out ol the cemetery. The band marched oil' to a livelv tune. Then generals and the otiier officers, ami the two sons of the dead warrior- went back to their wor';. a little more determined, perhaps, to fight on.