Notes and Comments.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 199, 6 May 1902, Page 3

Notes and Comments.

t is to the artist of letters that we owe most of our impres-

war sions of war — to the pictures, pen of a Steevens or a Fitchefct, and all the other great word painters who can cause the breath to quicken and the breast to swell as they depict some itirring scene with the easy confidence of one who has seen, and would make all men see. The war in South Africa has in its turn caused new writers to spring into notice, and none is more realistic than the writer in Blackwood’s under the non dh plume of “ Linesman.” To him has been entrusted the work of writing a descriptive narrative of the war, and truly it will be a work to ba read. Under his realistic pen the sights and sounds of war become more intellegible to us than to the. grimy warriors engaged in their production, for even here the looker-on sees most of the game. To the soldier it is one equipment, one set of officers, one kopje rising out of the end of a long day’s march , and after a hastily cooked and insufficient meal, a short night’s rest, and then one pile of stones facing another, with the hum-drum work of firing a rifle at another pile, or apparently into space at the direction of his section leader, who again is subordinate to some one else. But to the onlooker the weary, back-breaking match lias a definite goal, the apparently purposeless marches and halts have a definite meaning; and the cracking of whips, the shouting of native boys and the creak of the waggons at the breath of morn all lead up to his narrative- and infuse it with that breath of realism that brings conviction to the reader. At the battle front he sees the whole panorama and notes how the tide of war ebbs and flows, notes with interested indifference the struggles and the sacrifices of the many, and stores them up, to be reproduced in glowing sentences, so a« to form kinernatograpnic pictures of th e mind for millions of people to whom the war would otherwise be merely a list of killed and wounded on either side. But hear “ Linesman ” talk of the fight for Pieters Hill, on MajubaDay, two years ago, when some of the most terrific fighting of the war occurred The big Boer trench shrieked at them and forgot all about the shells crashing into it at the rate of fifty a minute, and a sound as of a waterfall rolled down from it towards the charging soldiers—a ceaseless roar of rifles and rush of bullets, with wild shouts between, and sudden appearances and disappearances of faces and figures in the smoke and dust, sometimes from the very midst of an explosion of lyddite. What words can paint the sounds and sights of that fighting—the great winds which seemed to spring up, the deadly calms of certain little retired spots in which perhaps a couple of Corpses grovelled like rooting pigs, the

mighty roar of voice- the sing], piercing cries, the iron nail-; upon ihe stones, tho hot, d'rty But her of the men’s equipment, the smell of hands and feet and warm steel, the -mell of fresh blood and chemical-. Kitchener's men kept steadily upward. Never did an attack move siruighter, nor was there ever one with less apparent order in its movement. Little groups and | little wavy lines, even little files and ) single soldiers poured like driarn-fignres up through the clamour and confusion that rose and fell along that terrible hillside. Men appeared from nowhere, and pressed forward to nowhere, seen and lost in a moment like figure* in a fog. ■ . . The wounded usually

began to und’ess, looking furtively from side to side ; some moving thus were bit again and again, and they took the blows wincing, with patient faces, which sank quiet! v to the ground when a bullet came at last to end it all- And all the time the swarm of living rolled on and up until only a few yards separated them from tho main Boer work. The broadside pulled itsel r together and hurled salvo after salvo into it. the great wall danced and crumbled, vanished in parts, in parts grew higher,with suddenly born battlements and turrets as the boulders were flungin confusion rlong the para pet, grinding and splitting and shaving their cold blue inner surface. Not a shell went astray, the parapet received them all full in its rocky face, doing its beat for the cause, and no bad symbol of it in its ugly stubbornness. Oh that last five minutes’ bombardment. The lovers of sober writing must not read nf war, for the artist has not yet lived who can write of bell with heavenly temperance; and if ever hell was let loose upon the uncondemned, it was upon those farmers manning the wall upon the roof of Pieters Hill. In one greatexplosionthey stood and fired, in one atmosphere of blasted air and filthy fumes, in one terrible green and brown darkness, in one continual earthquake. They seemed to go mad, as well they might, As the trotting soldiers drew near many of them actually leapt from behind their cover on to the top of the parapet itself, and were seen against the sky wildly firing from the very midst of the bursting shells down at the advancing Britons, and the great cheer that rose from the army behind as they closed was not all for the mammikins waving helmets on bayonet ends, but in part also for those that could be seen falling backwards with uplifted arms. The last stand was over. Had the Boer army never stood again, their name was made ; even now, two year* after, the heart beats faster and the eye dilates as those little figures on the parapet and ’ those trotting towards # theraare conjured up. With the capture of the main trench on Pieters Hill the position was won, and the British array swept up and over it as if no fortress would ever stop it again —and in that mood none ever will! ”