The reader will not be prepared to hear that anything funnier than that could grow out of this situation. But it was to be so. Weeks after our singular editorial experience ended I received, while in Capetown, a letter from an interested Afrikander asking me whether I thought the three men who guaranteed Barlow against a loss of profits from his paper were responsible men, and Barlow would be likely to get his money.
I went away to nurse my injured leg, and the other editors went their ways to arrange for getting out a new paper, which all of us agreed should be christened with the now historic name of The Friend. While we are thus separated from them let me draw a pen picture of each.
Perceval Landon, representing the Times, is a university man, who has been admitted to the bar, and who took up the work of a war correspondent from an Englishman's love of adventure, danger, and excitement. It can be nothing but his English blood that prompted him to this course, for in mind and temperament, tastes and qualifications, he is at once a scholar and a poet rather than a man of violent action. Had the Times so desired he would have charmed the public with letters from the front as human and picturesque in subject and treatment as any that were sent to London. His charms of manner and of mind caused his companionship to be sought by the most distinguished and the most polished men in the army, and all were deeply sorry when, at the close of the army's stay in Bloemfontein, illness forced him to return to London, though not until he had served in the war as long as any man at that time on the west side of the continent.
Mr. H. A. Gwynne, representing Reuter's Agency, is a veteran war correspondent, though a young man otherwise. He is Landon's diametrical opposite, being above all else a man of action and a born soldier. As an author and as a mountain climber of distinction he was known before he adopted the profession of journalism and took part in, I think, ten campaigns: The Turko-Greek, the Omdurman campaign, the Egyptian campaign preceding it, and others. It was Gwynne who, with Mr. George W. Steevens, received the surrender of the town of Volo from the Greek authorities before the Turks entered the town. Mr. Gwynne has superabundant strength, health, and spirits, loves soldiering and adventure, and is so shrewd in his judgment of men, and practised in his observations of war, that more than one general made it a practice to consult him upon what he knew and saw during the South African campaign. How well he can write the pages of The Friend attest.
Mr. Buxton is a specialist in the interests which are uppermost in Johannesburg, where, as a member of the staff of the Star, and as a citizen of consequence, he has made himself intimately known to the forceful men of South Africa, and has mastered the problems that lie before the British in reconstructing the government and welding the two leading races together. He had accompanied Lord Methuen's unfortunate army from its start to its rescue by Lord Roberts, and during all that time his knowledge of the country and of the Boers might have been turned to good account had he been consulted. It was fitting that the staff of the newspaper should have had upon it a representative colonial of English stock, yet of long and masterful local experience such as Mr. Buxton.
For a striking picture of the minor characters who figured as our foremen and compositors in the newspaper office the reader will do well to read Rudyard Kipling's "A Burgher of the Free State," one of the short stories he wrote after his return from South Africa in the early summer of 1900.
It showed us associates of the master storyteller how instantly, broadly, and accurately he is able to imbibe and absorb the colour and spirit, and even the most minor accessories of any new and strong situation around him. It will show the reader better than any amount of another man's writing the characters of our helpmeets and neighbours, and the atmosphere in which they moved.
CHAPTER II
Its Infancy
A little Thing, puling Great Promises in its Nurses' Arms.
On March 16, 1900, there glimmered (it cannot be said to have flashed) upon the Army and the half-wondering, half-treacherous population of Bloemfontein, the first number of The Friend. It was produced in the office of the former Friend of the Free State—an office that had the appearance of having been arranged out of a dust-heap, and stocked with machinery, type, and furniture that had been originally bought at second-hand and left to itself through fifty years of frequent dust-storms.