Julian Ralph

“ The only person who openly and plainly espoused the cause of the Boers was Miss Bloemfontein—a woman. The only person who answered her and proudly asserted her loyalty to Great Britain was Miss Uitlander—a woman.
Everywhere in every war it is Lovely Woman who fans the flames, who urges on the fighting, who charges the men to win or die, but never to give up; who nurses the hatreds of the strife to her breast and keeps them hot. ”

“ Miss Uitlander did, indeed, with joy and pride, trip out to meet Mr. Englishman, though, as a matter of fact, she is as much Miss Bloemfontein as yourself. In reality, your correct name is Miss Free-Stater. But that is a trifle which may pass. The "loving hand" you boast of having extended to us has long since been covered by an iron glove, the weight of which we have daily been made to feel, and to that you must associate the joyful flaunting of our colours in your face. His coming meant freedom—the sweetest thing in the world—to us. ”

“ The whole country is as wet as that orange of which geographers speak when they tell us that the water on the earth's surface is proportioned as if we were to rub a rough orange with a wet cloth. Up in what we used to call British America the illustration is itself illustrated in the countless lakes of all sizes, the innumerable small streams, and the many great rivers that make waterways the roads, as canoes are the wagons, of the region. It is a vast paradise for mosquitoes, and I have been hunted out of fishing and hunting grounds by them as far south as the border. ”

“ The mechanical draughtsman is dead. He has been killed by the camera.
How would it be possible in Fleet Street or De Aar, quietly sitting in a little room with a north light, to give a true impression of Cronje's surrender, or of that wonderful sight, the approach of the captured army, like a cloud of locusts, over the expanse of veldt at Klip Drift?
If ever the surrender at Paardeberg is painted, it must be done by a man who saw it. ”

“ Wet feet, wet bodies, intense cold, whatever came, found and left them indifferent. Night after night, in camp, in the open air, or in our log shanty, we white men trembled with the cold when the log fire burned low, but the Indians never woke to rebuild it. Indeed, I did not see one have his blanket pulled over his chest at any time. Woodcocks were drumming in the forest now and then, and the shrill, bird-like chatter of the squirrels frequently rang out upon the forest quiet. My Indian knew every noise, no matter how faint, yet never raised his head to listen. ”

“ It was only Smith-Dorrien's brigade marching into Bloemfontein but if it could have passed just as it was, down Piccadilly and the Strand it would have driven London crazy. I got down from the truck which we were unloading and watched them, the ragged bearded fierce-eyed infantry straggling along under their cloud of dust. Who could conceive who has seen the prim soldier of peace that he could as quickly transform himself into this grim virile barbarian. Bulldog faces, hawk faces, hungry wolf faces—every kind of face except a weak one. ”

“ If we could put on wings early in October, and could fly down from James's Bay over the dense forests and countless lakes and streams of western Ontario, we would see now and then an Indian or hunter in a canoe, here and there a lonely huddle of small houses forming a Hudson Bay post, and at even greater distances apart small bunches of the cotton or birch-bark tepees of pitiful little Cree or Ojibaway bands. ”

“ Draw closer, Miss Bloemfontein. Let our arms touch, and the thrill of ardent friendship vivify our new relation. You do like us British, don't you, dear? You don't have to be British yourself, you know. You can stay on being Dutch and piously Presbyterian and all the rest. We will respect whatever you admire, and we will promise to make you richer, freer, happier and even more beautiful—with the ripened charms of a long-assured content, if only you will let your chief predikant publish the banns next Sunday—or sooner, if you will. ”

“ If the factor chats with his driver, who falls behind at rough places to keep the sled from tipping over, their conversation is carried on at so high a tone as to startle the birds into flight, if there are any, and to shock the scene as by the greatest rudeness possible in that then vast, silent land. If silence is kept, the factor reads the prints of game in the snow, of foxes' pads and deer hoofs, of wolf splotches, and the queer hieroglyphics of birds, or the dots and troughs of rabbit-trailing. ”

“ Although every lip is silent on the subject of the morning's news, latest and worst of all; although the spoken word is all of a brilliant campaign, a stroke of luck, a speedy and safe return, there looms before each mind the coming list of casualties, the thought of war's inevitable chances, the possibility that here and now are some who may never be seen again firm-footed on a metropolitan causeway, whose trick of a smile, twist of a moustache, and cock of hat upon forehead must become a slowly dimming memory through the remnants of a life. ”

“ The province is a sportsman's Eden, but the hunting of big game there is not a venture to be lightly undertaken. It is not alone the distance or the cost that gives one pause, for, after the province is reached, the mountain-climbing is a task that no amount of wealth will lighten. And these are genuine mountains, by-the-way, wearing eternal caps of snow, and equally eternal deceit as to their distances, their heights, and as to all else concerning which a rarefied atmosphere can hocus-pocus a stranger. ”

“ And here are other men again, taller and sturdier than infantry of the line, grim, solid men, as straight as poplars. There is a maple-leaf, I think, upon their shoulder straps, and a British brigade is glad enough to have those maples beside them. For these are the Canadians, the men of Paardeberg, and there behind them are their comrades in glory, the Shropshire Light Infantry, slinging along with a touch of the spirit of their grand sporting colonel, the man who at forty-five is still the racquet champion of the British army. ”

“ I asked to be taken into the tent to which she went, and there, at the interpreter's request, she threw off her blanket, and stood, with a little display of honest coyness, dressed like the traditional and the theatrical belle of the wilderness. The soft yellowish leather, the heavy fringe upon the arms, seams, and edges of the garment, her beautiful beaded leggings and moccasins, formed so many parts of a very charming picture. For herself, her face was comely, but her figure was—an Indian's. The figure of the typical Indian woman shows few graceful curves. ”

“ The Indian east of the Rocky Mountains is to me the subject of an admiration which is the stronger the more nearly I find him as he was in his prime. It is not his fault that most of his race have degenerated. It is not our fault that we have better uses for the continent than those to which he put it. But it is our fault that he is, as I have seen him, shivering in a cotton tepee full of holes, and turning around and around before a fire of wet wood to keep from freezing to death; furnished meat if he has been fierce enough to make us fear him, left to starve if he has been docile ”

“ But there yet remains to be discussed the question of the arme blanche—the bayonet, the weapon with which our gallant army has won so many of its victories. I have heard not a few officers declare that this war will be known in history as the last war in which a British soldier carried a bayonet. But is the discarding of the bayonet to be one of the results of the use of the new rifle and the smokeless powder? When fighting against an enemy who does not carry it, the force which is armed with a bayonet has a tremendous moral superiority. ”

“ A MOOSE BULL FIGHT
Mile after mile we walked, up mountain and down dale, slapped in the faces by twigs, knocking snow down the backs of our necks, slipping knee-deep in bog mud, tumbling over loose stones, climbing across interlaced logs, dropping to the height of one thigh between tree trunks, sliding, falling, tight-rope walking on branches over thin ice, but forever following the cat-like tread of Alexandre, with his seven-league stride and long-winded persistence. ”

“ Some are maned like lions, some have young, keen faces, but all leave an impression of familiarity upon me. And yet I have not seen irregular British cavalry before. Why should I be so familiar with this loose-limbed, head-erect, swaggering type; of course it is the American cow-boy over again. Strange that a few months of the veldt has produced exactly the same man that springs from the western prairie. But these men are warriors in the midst of war. Their eyes are hard and quick. They have the gaunt, intent look of men who live always under the shadow of danger. ”

“ In this part of its magnificent valley the Columbia broadens in two long loops, called the Arrow Lakes, each more than two miles wide and twenty to thirty miles in length. Their prodigious towering walls are densely wooded, and in places are snow-capped in midsummer. The forest growth is primeval, and its own luxuriance crowds it beyond the edge of the grand stream in the fretwork of fallen trunks and bushes, whose roots are bedded in the soft mass of centuries of forest débris. ”

“ This part of the warfare, where you walk well within the enemy's firing line with only a revolver, the Boers continually sniping and potting, no cover, and no chance of a "kick or hit back," makes you feel as though you would like to charge into their midst, get hand to hand, and at least have one shot or hit, in return for the compliments and salutes they pay you. But no, you must stand still in the open, coolly go on with the sketching, and not mind the bullets, even if they take a leg off the plane table or knock the pencil out of your hand. ”

“ There is one animal, king of all the beasts, which the most unaspiring hunter may chance upon as well as the bravest, and that animal carries a perpetual chip upon its shoulder, and seldom turns from an encounter. It is the grizzly-bear. It is his presence that gives you either zest or pause, as you may decide, in hunting all the others that roam the mountains. Yet, in that hunter's dream-land it is the grizzly that attracts many sportsmen every year.
From the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company in Victoria I obtained the list of animals in whose skins that company trades at that station. ”

“ Sight-seeing is a passion 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 surpass the man with the pencil in depicting the actuality of warfare? ”

“ Beyond the coast is the bold chain of mountains of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are parts. Here is a vast treasure in that coal which our naval experts have found to be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are traces of metals, whose value industry has not yet established.
It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 100,000 white inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It is a vast land of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the field and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sportsman to the quarry of the miner. ”

“ Proper scouting in an open country is a dead department of military service. How long did we lie at Modder River without knowing anything of value of the movements of the enemy? A series of kopjes might conceal a few sharpshooters or an army—at a mile's distance scouts were under the fire of an invisible foe. ”

“ Come, then, ye gentles and geniuses, ye poets, ye anecdotists, ye thrillers and movers with the pen—join our staff, and put your mighty little ink-damped levers to the rock that we are rolling up the gigantic kopje of your thirst for news and entertainment. Your pay shall be the highest ever meted out to man—the satisfaction of souls content. Your company shall include a Kipling. ”

“ It is a Hudson Bay axiom that no man who cannot curse in three languages is fit to drive them. The three profanities are, of course, English, French, and Indian, though whoever has heard the Northwest French knows that it ought to serve by itself, as it is half-soled with Anglo-Saxon oaths and heeled with Indian obscenity. The rule with whoever goes on a dog-sled journey is that the driver, or mock-passenger, runs behind the dogs. ”

“ To anyone who threads the vast silent forests of the interior, or journeys upon the trafficless waterways, or, gun in hand, explores the mountains for game, the infrequency with which Indians are met becomes impressive. The province seems almost unpeopled. The reason is that the majority of the Indians were ever on the coast, where the water yielded food at all times and in plenty. The natives of the interior were not well fed or prosperous when the first white men found them, and since then small-pox, measles, vice, and starvation have thinned them terribly. ”