Wheeling register. [volume] (Wheeling, W. Va.) 1878-1935, 1899-12-22
WAR STORIES ARE COMING N
CORRESPONDENTS OF LONDON
PAPERS, SEND DEsCRIPTI0s
OF BATTLES,
Battlefields and Incidents of the
War in South Africa-A Young
officer of the Manchesters Writes
ness of Tommy Atkins-The Dis
aster at Nicke1sons Nek-The hat
tlefeId of EIangsIaagte.

Correspondence, Associated Press.)
LONDON, December 13.-Letters
from British officers and soldiers fight
ing in the Transvaal and lengthy de-
scriptions from war correspondents
that filter into print through the mails,
TEEN with thrilling and pathetic Incl
dents.
Writing to his mother, a young Off
Ger of the Manchesters, wounded in one
of the first engagements, relates that
while he lay at night on the hillside,
expecting to die, bleeding from a bad
wound in his thigh and shivering with
cold, there stumbled over him a
Tommy of my company named Rog-
ers." This Tommy quickly whipped
off his own overcoat, placed it around
the boy officer, and lying down put
his arms around him, and for the rest
of that long, cold night kept him
beautifully warm"
The Times correspondent gives a
graphic account and explanation of the
British disaster at Nicholsons Mex,
where Carletons column. consisting OF
six companies of the Royal Irish
Fusiliers, four and half companies
of the Worcestershire regiment and
number ten mountain battery surren-
dered. The disaster was due to a
stampede of mules.
The correspondent at Ladysmith of
the same paper describing the battle
field of Elandsaagte, realistically de-
tails the horrors of war. He writes:
''The battlefield conveyed sufficient
proof of the severity of the fire. The
wounded had been removed by day.
light, but the burial parties had not
arrived. The men lay there as they had
fallen, sad, pathetic tribute to the
courage Of the British soldier. We vol
unteers lay indiscriminately grouped.
Then solitary figures under the stones
showed how little the cover had avail
ed them. There were places where
wire fences had impeded the advance.
Here the carnage had been great and
one brave fellow. stopped in death, cut
off as he strove to wrench a post from
its foundations.
eve rode back to the Boer position
the little kopje upon which Schiel
and his % men had made their last
stand. The bodies of the fifteen that
had fallen of this little band. were
grouped as death had taken them"
Bennett Burleigh. the Daily Tele-
graphs war correspondent, supplies a
full account of the humiliation of the
armored train contingent at Chieveley
when Winston Churchill was captured
The train, it appears. with the excep-
ton of the engine, tender and two
trucks, was badly wrecked by the re-
moval of fish plates and the Y men OF
the Dublin Fusiliers and the 90 men
of the Durham Light Infantry, to say
nothing of five blue jackets from the
Tarter, were thrown out. Captain
Haldane, Of the Gordon Highlanders
who commanded the party, rallied his
bruised and shaken men, and, amid a
hail OF bullets from the Beers, began
to clear the line, while others were
pouring deadly volleys into the almost
unseen Beers, hidden behind the rocks
about one thousands yards of. The
blue jackets, bravely commanded by
their petty oficer-who was the incar-
nation of coolness-got their seven
FOUNDER into action.
The Daily Graphic's correspondent,
describing a visit to the hulk Penelope
at Somers Bay, where the Boer pris-
oners were confined, undertaken in the
company of Col Stowe. the United
States consul general, writes:
"The majority OF the prisoners are
sleek, contented and Indifferent. They
told me they thought the war would
be panic; that they would rush
Natal before the imperial troops arriv-
ed, that England would be involved in
foreign complications and that they
would be able to dictate terms from
PietermaritzbuTg and Durham. They
thought to view the Cape peninsula as
conquerors, not from a prison ship.
Col. Schiel steps with difficulty. His
wound in the thigh is nearly healed
but he still requires the use CT a
stick"