Daily inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1881-1901, 1900-04-12
B0ERS .RETIRINC
TOWARD LADYSMI2H

-
the enemy, who fired into the horses,
stampeding them. Lieutenant Water
meyer, who had run for his horse, was
in the act of mounting when a Boer
came around the corner of the house and
fired point blank at him. The bullet
struck his arm and grazed along his left
shoulder. He let fall the reins, raised his
rifle and shot the Boer dead. His horse
having bolted, he crossed the farm yard
and gained the garden and thence, leap
ing the wall, escaped across the plain.
FOrty-three officers and men were killed,
wounded or taken prisoners by them"
Provost Battersby thus moralizes in
the Morning Post on the incongruities
of war, under date of Osfontein, March s:
art and war; Who has the temerity
still to speak of them together, which not
even by their contrasts can be COM
pared? Beneath me, behind an red
brown anthill, figure in khaki is lying,
with his cheek against his rifle, his eye
along the sight. There is lump of iron
stone 900 yards in front of him, on the
lower slope of a kopje. and under it is a
man whom he is trying to kill. He
knows nothing of the man, but that he
wears a grey felt hat and has pretty
style of shooting, for the ant-hill has
been struck three times. The man knows
probably even less of him. They move
in ordinary circumstances, 1000 miles
apart; have not an interest nor even a
quarrel in common.
Each has, perhaps, his share of the
virtues, makes good woman happy,
and does his duty by the state. With
less space between them and no supply
of cartridges, they might be- the best of
friends.
But that is the inevitable congruity
of war, the effect of enmity without its
existence. Wrath bringeth the punish
| ments of the sword said the writer of
Job, but the punishment of the sword
does not always bring wrath. Men can
be made to stay by each other without
that inducement. Lying not far beyond
that figure in khahi is a black patch. The
grey-green scrub almost conceals it, all
but two queer dark wisps like the talons
of a bird clenched and turned upward.
They are the hands of a man. Beneath
them, looking upward also, is the face
of Kaffir. One knows it to be a face by
it's position. but the shrapnel which
passed through it has made a mass of
black and red, with no human resem-
blance. The figure in khaki holds his
nose when the wind passes his way over
it. There is little heap of potatoes be-
side the swollen body, which it was gath
ering when war came by. That also is
| an inevitable irfcongruity: the doom of
| the peaceful. One accepts it with the
other. War is this sort of thing-blind
! senseless, indiscriminate. It is also, after
a fashion, worse than that.
ITO think steadfastly of art is to effect
| Transformation in personality no less
astonishing than that which Robert
| Louis Stevenson conceived for DIR. Jekyll
1.-The change really is incredible; it is
| impossible to describe. One must live
here first in this bare, empty land, with
| life grown suddenly cheap and death al
| ways about one; with friends buried at
night that shared ones biscuit in the
mornings battle, and remembered again
with an intolerable smart with destruc-
tion and victory only in ones thoughts,
and the ruin and foulness of an army
round one-it is in that one must be
| stepped to realize how far one has come:
so far that vision and thought and
beauty seem left behind one in another
| world"