BOER WAR INCIDENTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 April 1938, Page 5

BOER WAR INCIDENTS

RECOLLECTIONS OF COLONEL SLEEMAN. TRENCH TOOL INVENTED. we-jr- - How one of the last captures in the South African War was made was recalled by Colonel J. L. Sleeman, C.M.G., C.8.E., M.V.0., Chief Commissioner of the St. John Ambulance Brigade Overseas, in an interview in South Africa.

“As a scout officer,” Colonel Sleeman recollected, “I captured a small party of Boers beyond Kruitfontein Drift, near Bloemfontein. When we got to Bloemfontein, 48 hours later, we found the armistice had been granted, and I had to take them all the way back to where I had captured them. I still remember the pleasant relationship between capturer and captured on that trip.” Earlier in the war, Colonel Siceman, then a second-lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, passed close to Johannesburg during Lord Roberts’s general advance on Pretoria. He did not actually enter the city, however, until 1935, for during the whole of the war he had no second chance of seeing it. THE FLYING COLUMN.

He was a member of Lord Kitchener’s flying column to Prieska. Tor 50 miles, on the way, the column trotted and galloped without pausing to walk. Conditions were so bad that 120 horses were killed during a single day’s ride. Colonel Sleeman told how he came to evolve the trench tool which saved so many thousands of British lives in the Great War. Sir lan Hamilton, who was attached to the Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, was much impressed by a light tool used by the Japanese for digging trenches. He told Lord Kitchener at Singapore about it, and Lord Kitchener obtained some of the tools from Japan and set Colonel Sleeman in charge of experiments with them in India.

It was found that the Japanese tool was useless for the bigger soldiers of the British Army, but a new tool was evolved as a result of the experiments and was adopted in 1906. At the time Colonel Sleeman’s brother officers objected bitterly against the extra weight to be carried, but its worth was proved in the Great War, and many South African ex-ser-vicemen have thanked Colonel Slee■jnan during his present tour for it.

Colonel Sleeman was also one of the founders of the Officers’ Training Corps in the English public schools and universities. Soon after the Great War he was chief of general staff in New Zealand under Lord Jellicoe, and he recalls the great admiral’s magnificent brain.