War's Brighter Side Part 48

Toilet soaps and English laundry soap disappeared long ago. You cannot buy a razor or a shaving-brush or a tooth-brush.

More than one druggist lacks material for putting up prescriptions: glycerine, cascara, bromide of pota.s.sium, boracic acid, carbolic disinfectants, ginger, zinc oxide, blue ointment, acetate of lead, and iodoform. Absence of some of these from the prescription shelves might result seriously.

Eno's Salts and chlorodyne cannot be bought in town. Beecham's Pills were "all out" four months ago.

The flour mills have been closed for several days for want of water.

They will resume, feeding their boilers with well water, but the end of the wheat supply is in sight. There is still mealie meal, but bakers declare that it won't make bread.

Cigars that are worth smoking and whisky worth drinking haven't been seen for a week. Hospitals take all the soda-water that the factory can make.

Shoemakers have not even veldschoens in ordinary sizes. They have had no leather for two weeks, so shoe repairing is out of the question.

Winter is coming on, the mornings are already growing chilly, but clothiers have no hose and no heavy underwear of white man's quality.

All hats suitable for army wear were sold long ago.

Merchants declare that if they had not been promised two trucks a day by rail they would have brought supplies from Kimberley by ox-waggon.

It would have taken six days, but would have been worth while.

CHAPTER XXVIII

OUR "FRIEND" NO LONGER

_We retire from the paper, leaving it in able and patriotic hands._

The unique and delightful episode had ended. On April 16th, just one month after we established this new departure in war, we turned THE FRIEND over to the proprietor of the _Johannesburg Star_, upon an arrangement quickly and generously made by Lord Stanley. Within a week I was ordered home by the surgeons who saw the state my battered body was in. Mr. Landon preceded me by a few days, invalided also. Mr.

Buxton remained upon the paper under its new proprietors, who were old workmates with him, and Mr. Gwynne remained, and yet remains as a war correspondent (January, 1901), st.u.r.dily doing his always excellent work in the field. In that work I think he has few superiors among living English-speaking correspondents, and I know that many military and journalistic experts agree with me. The pity is that the nature of his work for Reuter's has kept his genius as a writer practically hidden from the public.

Mr. Sh.e.l.ley took up the photographer's side of the entertaining duel between the men of his calling and the actual and proper artists; Mr.

Melton Prior indignantly lamented an indignity or an attempted theft of which he had been the victim. We reported a great football match between the officers of the Gordons and those of the First Contingent of the Royal Canadian Regiment; and, finally, we perpetrated the fourth hoax, in what we called "Our Portrait Gallery." The "portrait"

was in each case from the same advertis.e.m.e.nt block which Mr. Gwynne and I had found on the floor of the _Express_ composing-room, which he had thought nearly enough like Mr. Burdett-Coutts to bear production as a likeness, and which we presently resolved to publish every day as a picture of a different man each time.

The notice of a concert in aid of the Widows' and Orphans' Fund refers to a notable enterprise engineered by the universally distinguished Mr. Bennet Burleigh of the _Daily Telegraph_, aided by Mr. Maxwell, the very talented correspondent of the _Standard_, and others. They carried it out with such skill that the entertainment proved the greatest social event, if we may so term it, of the army's sojourn in the capital. Every one of note who was able to be there attended it, and the receipts at the doors and in the compet.i.tion over the works of Messrs. Prior and Wollen, were very considerable.

PRICE: PRICE: ONE PENNY. THE FRIEND. ONE PENNY.

(_Edited by the War Correspondents with Lord Roberts' Force._)

BLOEMFONTEIN, EASTER MONDAY, APRIL 16, 1900.

"OUR FRIEND" NO LONGER

BY JULIAN RALPH

At some time all friends must part, and the time and parting have come to THE FRIEND, its friends of the public and those war correspondents who have been conducting this journal just one month to-day.

To-morrow this paper will be turned over from the charge of those who were only writers to the hands of men who are practised and able in the management of all departments of a daily journal.

In bidding farewell to our trust, we can boast of nothing unless it be that we have entertained the troops and the town, and made no enemies of whom we know. The rest of what we have done has only been trying--though we have tried hard.

We have said before in this column that it has been an unique experiment--to make one loyal newspaper out of two that were none too English, to make it with talent unused to the work, to make it, often, without news and to conduct it so as to produce something palatable to both the conquerors and the conquered.

We take this occasion to thank the Field Marshal, Lord Roberts, for the trust he reposed in us, and to express the hope that we did not disappoint him.

We also wish to thank those who have a.s.sisted us, both among our fellow correspondents and the talented men of the army. Poets we find the latter to be, for the most part. We hope all these will continue to give the helpful right hand to the enterprise under its new managers.

And so we say "adieu" to THE FRIEND, and good luck to its new conductors.

OUR PORTRAIT GALLERY

No. 4.

LIEUT.-GENERAL POLE-CAREW, C.B.

[Ill.u.s.tration: General Pole-Carew.]

We feel that we owe an apology to our readers for presenting the portrait of one of our first fighting generals in civilian costume, but our artist left his colours at home and refused to paint at all unless with plain black. The artist in question is Captain Cecil Lowther, of the Scots Guards, and this is his first effort in art. For General Pole-Carew, the subject of this masterpiece, what is there to say except that his promotion has gratified the entire army and evoked the heartiest congratulations from THE FRIEND?

THE WAR ARTIST OF TO-DAY

BY H. C. Sh.e.l.lEY.

_Editors_, THE FRIEND,--SIRS,--Can you inform me whether there has been a sudden exodus from Bloemfontein of war correspondents armed with cameras? There ought to have been, and yet I have inquired in vain whether such an event has taken place. For, look you, the judgment has gone forth from the pen of Mr. Wollen that the "war artist"--meaning the man with a pencil as opposed to the men with a camera--"will come out on top." Truly, this is most disheartening. No one likes to be thrust to a bottom position, and if that is to be the fate of the man with a camera, why should he any longer endure the hards.h.i.+ps of campaigning and the sorrows of separation from the comforts and companions.h.i.+ps of home?

But the war correspondent with a camera has not gone home. He has no intention of doing so. He is unrepentant enough to believe that he, and not the man with a pencil, is going to "come out on top."

Let us have the point at issue clearly defined. War correspondents are with the army to report the war--some by word pictures, others by camera or pencil pictures. Sight-seeing is a pa.s.sion with humanity.

Every inhabitant of the British Isles would like to have a personal vision of the conflict in South Africa, but--save for two or three irresponsible persons whose presence at the front no one can understand--those inhabitants are compelled to rely upon the eyes of others. Now, leaving aside the correspondents who devote themselves to word pictures solely, the question to be decided is--does the man with the camera surpa.s.s the man with the pencil in depicting the actuality of warfare?

An astounding claim is made on behalf of the man with the pencil. He can, we are told by Mr. Wollen, show the public "an accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like." And he does it by "a few lines to indicate the background and characteristics of it." The same authority a.s.sures us that "the brain of the camera cannot take in all that is going on. The man with the pencil does so." Such is the case for the man with the pencil. Now for the test of cross-examination.

Modder River and Maghersfontein may be cited as two representative battles of the war, and so may be honestly used as touchstones to try the claim Mr. Wollen makes on behalf of the man with a pencil. In each case there was a battle-line of some five or six miles, in each case the enemy was invisible, in each case it was physically impossible for any one man to see more than a small portion of the battle. A spectator on the right flank at Modder River could have no personal knowledge of incidents which were happening in the centre of the bridge, or down the river on the left flank. Even of his own particular section on the right flank that spectator could not attain to a perfect knowledge. But the man with a pencil is untrammelled by such minor matters as time and s.p.a.ce; he "takes in all that is going on." Or, if he does not take it all in, he puts it in his sketch. The result is no more "an accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like" than a photograph of Oom Paul is like a photograph of Mr.

Chamberlain. In short, the facility with which the pencil-man can jot down what he did not see is his ruin.

It will be obvious that the man with the pencil, not being ubiquitous, _cannot_ "take in" all that happens on a battlefield; he sees just as much as, and no more than, the man with the camera; for the rest--which forms so large a proportion of his sketch--he has to rely upon the testimony of others. Now, when the public have in their hands a result attained by this method, what is its value as an "accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like?" Absolutely _nil_. People at home want to see a battle as they would have seen it if they had been present, and no sane man will contest the a.s.sertion that the best medium for giving them that vision is the camera rather than the pencil. Try as he may after the actual, the man with the pencil thrusts his personality between the event he sees and the people at home for whom he wishes to reproduce it, and consequently his sketch becomes a miserable failure when considered as an "accurate bird's-eye view of what a battle is like."

On the other hand, what does the man with the camera do? He and his lens see at least so much of a given battle as any man with a pencil, and what they see they see with unfailing accuracy. Take that battery in action which Mr. Wollen choses to cite as a subject wherein the powerlessness of the camera is supposed to be ill.u.s.trated. The camera man does not fear the test. He can show the guns coming into action, record their unlimbering, depict the preparation for firing, and time a photograph at the actual moment of firing. It is true that his picture will not show quite such a volume of smoke as the sketch of the man with the pencil. But why? _Because the smoke is not there._ The man with the pencil puts it in because other men with pencils have been putting it in for generations. Perhaps, too, the public would not mistake the sketch for a battle-scene if the smoke were absent.

Anyhow, what becomes of the boast of _accuracy_? Moreover, the man with a camera will not present his public with a twelve-pounder firing from the carriage of a howitzer.

There is something more to be said for the man with a camera.