Therefore when Lord Stanley came he was certain to find us merry and voluble and prankish. He may have imagined that we must perforce be grave—we to whom was given the high and almost religious right to speak for an empire and an army, and to conduct a British organ in so delicate a situation as was ours among the Boers—neither offending them nor giving them a chance to find a flaw in the practice of our principles. Grave enough was that part of our work which we meant to be so.
Serious in its strain upon us and important in its effort to rest and inform and recreate the soldiers, was most of what we did. But it is a habit of the journalist's mind and a result of his work that he shall be or become a philosopher, viewing the world as it is, no matter how differently he may present it to a duller and more conservative public.
Therefore Lord Stanley found us declaiming soldier poetry, writing nonsense verses, drawing caricatures of one another, telling stories, behaving like men without a care on their minds. We realised that he must be shocked at us—and we voted that he behaved very well under the circumstances. He usually came in with a quick step and an air of business. We delayed him with chaff which he seemed always at a loss to understand at first. He got at our bundles of proof-sheets and he applied himself to them most gravely. By and by he began to catch the contagion of our spirits, his eye wandered from the sheets, he wavered—he began to join in our talk. "Is there anything else—or anything you are in doubt about?" he would ask. He believed us when we answered him, for he knew that we understood what not to publish. In that mutual trust and confidence there grew up a relation between us and himself which was dearly prized by us, and which we hope he esteemed as highly.
Once he told us that there had been complaint of a mock-speech by the German Emperor which some one had written among a lot of pretended cablegrams avowedly fanciful. Once he declined to publish a mild attack of mine upon Mr. Winston S. Churchill for finding fault with our army chaplains. At another time, upon the ground of prudence, he threw out an article upon our treasonous colonists which we copied from an Afrikander exchange. Apart from these slight exercises of his power he passed all our work, though it was as big in bulk as the "Newcomes" and "Vanity Fair" rolled together—300,000 words—ten columns a day for nearly thirty days!
I have called the censor's office a "hole in a wall," but our sanctum was not half as neat or presentable. Whoever has carried the collecting mania into the study of country newspaper offices has noticed how one never differs from another. The greasy smell of printer's ink, the distempered walls stuck over here and there with placards and the imprint of inky fingers, the gaping fireplace, the bare, littered floor, the table all cut on top and chipped at the edges, the bottomless chairs with varying degrees of further dismemberment, the "clank—clank" of the press in the next room—these are the proofs positive of genuine country newspaper offices the world around—from Simla to Bismarck, Dakota, and back again. And the office of The Friend was like all the rest.
THE FRIEND.
(Edited by the War Correspondents with Lord Roberts' Force.)
BLOEMFONTEIN, MONDAY, MARCH 26, 1900.