You Must Stop With
The British Army If You Want Bugle-Calls And Clanking Sabres And
Gauntlets.
They are a part of the panoply of war and of warriors.
But we saw no warriors at Ventersburg
That night, only a few cattle-
breeders and farmers who were fighting for the land they had won from
the lion and the bushman, and with them a mixed company of gentleman
adventurers - gathered around a table discussing other days in other
lands. The picture of war which is most familiar is the one of the
people of Brussels fleeing from the city with the French guns booming
in the distance, or as one sees it in "Shenandoah," where aides
gallop on and off the stage and the night signals flash from both
sides of the valley. That is the obvious and dramatic side; the
other side of war is the night before the battle, at Jones's Hotel;
the landlady in the dining-room with her elbows on the table,
fretfully deciding that after a day in front of the cooking-stove she
is too tired to escape an invading army, declaring that the one place
at which she would rather be at that moment was Green's restaurant in
Philadelphia, the heated argument that immediately follows between
the foreign legion and the Americans as to whether Rector's is not
better than the Cafe de Paris, and the general agreement that Ritz
cannot hope to run two hotels in London without being robbed. That
is how the men talked and acted on the eve of a battle.
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