But in undertaking this task their idea was that they merely had to start the paper and give it a momentum, after which the army would turn to and flood the editorial sanctum with tales of humour, wit, and prowess writ upon sheets numberless as the leaves of Vallambrosa.
The reader will gather that this has not yet taken place. He will infer that the war correspondents are, like the last rose of summer, left blooming to ourselves. True, two or three generous and gifted souls in the army have come nobly into the breach with contributions; but the breach is nine columns wide—nine columns that persist in emptying themselves as fast as we fill them; in fact, nine columns which become fifty-four columns between each Monday and the succeeding Saturday. It is on this account that when the two or three generous and talented army men flung themselves in the breach, the breach was not aware of the fact—and we have not had the heart to wake it up and notify it that it was being filled, not caring to tell a falsehood even to a silly breach.
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. Your readers shall be the bravest, noblest, proudest soldiers who ever served an earthly race.
You can ask no more. You can ask nothing else.
But in the meantime we want "copy."
We published also a brief communication respecting the Dutch name Stellenbosch. This needs a word of explanation. It had long been noticed that whenever an officer was prominently connected with a losing battle, or exhibited marked incompetence in any field of military work, he got a billet at Stellenbosch, a bowery village deep down in the Cape Colony, where was established our base camp of supplies. The name therefore attained a deep significance and common usage in the army, and to say that a man had been "Stellenbosched" was but the ordinary polite mode of mentioning what might otherwise have had to be said in many harsher-sounding words.
THE FRIEND.
(Edited by the War Correspondents with Lord Roberts' Force.)
BLOEMFONTEIN, FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 1900.