SCENE TWO.
The open veldt. Row of kopjes in the middle distance. Enter cavalry patrol with Reginald Talbot Vere-Croesus at their head. (Band playing, "Let 'em all come.")
FIRST SOLDIER: I thought I heard a rifle shot.
REGINALD TALBOT DE V.-C.: Nay. 'Twas but a soldier being shot for stealing a bar of soap from an enemy's cottage. Serve the miscreant right. Take open order, there. Walk, march!
_They ride round the stage with one eye on the kopjes and the other admiring the fit of their breeches. Rifle shots are heard from the kopjes. Band changes to, "You never know your Luck!" Heavy rattle of musketry from kopjes. Patrol driven back and retire to pom-pom accompaniment from the big drum_. R. T. de V.-C. _falls prone from his charger_. KATINKA _rushes in (r.u.e.) weeping hysterically and throws herself on his body_.
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ENTER JACOBUS JOHANNES VAN DER MAUSER _(l.e.), and leans on his rifle, staring gloomily at the scene._
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JACOBUS: Ha! ha! So it has come to this! She secretly loves the young English officer who reconnoitres kopjes with an eye-glass! (_Sticks his chin out, claws the air and ambles about the stage à la Henry Irving._) But I will be revenged! Ha! ha! I have it! I will go and join the Johannesburg police! False woman, what sayest thou?
KATINKA (_hysterically_): I am innocent, Johannes. I am innocent! (_Coils herself round the body of R. T. de V.-C. à la Sarah Bernhardt._)
JACOBUS: Innocent! Then why weepest thou?
KATINKA (_rising suddenly_): Weep! I should think I _would_ weep. Didn't he owe us three pound seventeen and sixpence for milk! How am I to make the dairy pay if you persist in shooting my best customers?
(JACOBUS _embraces her_. REGINALD TALBOT DE VERE-CROESUS _being, fortunately, shot exactly through the head with a Mauser bullet, recovers at once and embraces her also, and joins in a song-and-dance trio, "Be careful what you're doing with the gun," and the curtain falls to the tune of, "It mustn't occur again_.")
NOTE.--This farce will be continued till further orders.
A. B. P.
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THE WAR ARTIST OF TO-DAY.
_To the Editors of_ THE FRIEND,--SIRS,--The present campaign has most decidedly, as your correspondent in THE FRIEND of the 11th says, commenced a new era in the history of illustrated journalism, but not to the extent that he thinks.
The camera and the pencil can, and will, live together during a campaign, but I venture to doubt if the camera will be able to do all that its champion claims for it, and the war artist who knows his business, which cannot be learnt in a single campaign, will come out on top. For reproducing and putting before the public scenes representing the strife and clamour of war, with its accompanying noise and confusion, the man with the kodak cannot compete for one single moment with the individual who is using the pencil.
How can he produce a picture that will show the public at large anything like an accurate bird's-eye view of what a modern battle is like? The brain of the camera cannot take in all that is going on. The man with the pencil does so. A few lines to indicate the background and the characteristics of it, and he is able to put before the world what has taken place, that is if he knows and has seen what troops have been doing.
In another paragraph there is a sentence which is a very unjust reflection upon "the old-fashioned war artists, who draw on their imagination." I should very much like to know who the old-fashioned war artists can be who are referred to in this manner. The few men who are still alive, and there never were many of them, are all men who have seen a large amount of fighting, have sketched and worked under fire, sent their work home often under enormous difficulties, and been in very many tight places. Why should these men be referred to in this way?
I suppose there has not been one single campaign in which the camera has been in such frequent use; but is it possible, by this means, to bring before us the various phases of a battle--a modern battle, I mean, with its absence of smoke, enormous expanse of front and general invisibility of both the attackers and defenders? Take a battery in action. Can it show us the excitement and turmoil round the guns, will it show us (unless it is a cinematograph) the trouble amongst the teams when a shell drops near them? I think not. What it can do, and does, is scenes which are more or less peaceful, such as camp views, incidents in regimental life and also bits on the line of march, but of an action--no! None of us artists are at variance with Mr. Scott in other parts of his very able letter, and we cordially welcome the camera artist, knowing very well that he has his field of work in which we cannot hope to compete with him for a moment; but to put the camera, which, after all, is only a very fine piece of mechanism, on a par with a sketch is more than most people can put up with, especially
Yours very faithfully, W. B. WOLLEN, R.I.
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CHESTNUTTY--BUT GOOD.
_To the Editors of_ THE FRIEND,--SIRS,--Is this a chestnut? Johannes Paulus Kruger sent a commissioner home to England to find out if there were any more men left there. The commissioner wired from London to say that there were 4,000,000 men and woman "knocking about the town," that there was no excitement, and that men were begging to be sent to fight the Boers. Kruger wired back "Go North." The commissioner found himself in Newcastle eventually and wired to Kruger, "For God's sake, stop the war! England is bringing up men from hell, eight at a time, in cages!"
He had seen a coal mine.
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CIRCULATION, APRIL 11, 5,500.
The circulation of THE FRIEND is as large as that of all the Bloemfontein papers combined.[18]
[Footnote 18: This was a transparent joke, as there was no other paper in the town. But, joking apart, there never had been a newspaper in that country or region with such a circulation as ours enjoyed; yet it could have been twice as large had we employed our carts to circulate it in the outlying camps.--J. R.]
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DOTS OR NO DOTS.
_All about the New Stamp Issue._
BY MORTIMER MENPES.
How strange a thing it is that so small a matter as a general taste for collecting stamps should, as it were, elevate a man at a single bound into a position where his slightest tact at discrimination in detecting the difference of shades between two bits of paper of the same colour will sway and determine the destinies of a horde of fanatical collectors!
That a man should occupy so exalted a position was accidentally brought to my notice after a return to Bloemfontein from a run to the Cape, where I found the Market Square, the club, the hotels and the street corners grouped with people who appeared to be intensely interested in the discussion of some all-important subject. Thinking that some radical proclamation had been issued, I paused to listen, but instead of legal phrase and technical form greeting my ear, the only intelligible word which I could detect in the buzz which emanated from the centre of the group was "Dot."
I passed on to another group, where the same "dot" arrested my attention; then to a third, which was also "dotty," until, feeble and bewildered, I helplessly wandered about on the verge of an incurable "dottiness" myself.
Finally, I pulled myself together again and, blind to all danger, plunged into a group of "dotters," grasped one of them by the arm, and in reply to my appeals heard him hiss, as he roughly shook me off, "Surcharged stamps, you fool, misprinted, without dots." Then I understood. My curiosity was stimulated, I soon learned the subtle differences which add to or subtract value from the surcharged Free State stamps. Finally I became the proud possessor of a dotless one myself. That settled it; I became hopelessly "dotty" myself, and to the end of my natural days will always realise that affairs of State, literature, art, even money, are secondary to the importance of obtaining "the entire set," especially if they are from "the bottom row" and "dotless." This mania has taken possession of the entire army.
From Tommy to General, the last biscuit or a drink of whisky, or a pass to be out after 8 p.m. can be extracted after a dozen refusals by producing a dotless stamp.
Kruger could end this cruel war in an afternoon by simply sending out a dozen men mounted on swift horses, wearing white coats with the entire set without dots pasted on the back. These scouts should be unarmed and should ride in close to our lines and then turn round showing their backs. The moment the army would see the set, they would make a rush, and all the scouts would have to do would be to ride fast enough and in different directions, and by nightfall the Imperial forces would be hopelessly scattered, and lost in the boundless veldt. Kruger's scouts would be perfectly safe, for no one would dare to raise a rifle in their direction. Such an act might bring down a set; but imagine if you can the fate of the miscreant if one dotless stamp should be punctured or if--horrible thought!--a chance scattering of the lead should dot some of the precious bits of paper!
In my inquiries during the first stage of this disease, I found that Major O'Meara was the supreme authority on this subject. I found the Major seated in a small room of the National Bank sorting out from a huge collection the stamps which were to be surcharged. For three hours I watched him, as with wonderful skill and discrimination he picked out bits of paper which were obsolete and which an accidental surcharging would have made of untold value, and set the whole world of collectors into a palpitating hysteria of speculation, until finally catalogued and bought by some multi-millionaire bent upon ruining himself to appease his craze. That all the legally surcharged stamps are carefully catalogued in the Major's busy brain will doubtless surprise at some no distant date a few rascally speculators, who, possessing obsolete issues, have surreptitiously surcharged them, in the hope of creating a rarity to sell at fabulous prices. Leaving the Major's presence, I realised that the last stage of dotlessphobia had fastened itself on me, and, knowing that recovery is hopeless, have abandoned myself to full indulgence, hoping to derive at least some miserable satisfaction before the end. With this one reservation, I am determined never to surrender to the universal stamp collector's weakness of stealing. Others may walk uprightly through six days of the week about their ordinary affairs and turn aside on Sunday afternoon from the path of blindness to pilfer another collector's treasure while his face is turned away, out of politeness, to sneeze. But I; no, I shall never, never, no--I won't steal.