We went--two of us--in
the company of Lord Northcliffe, down into Surrey, to spend a day with
old Lord Roberts. Within three weeks thereafter Lord Roberts was dead
where no doubt he would have willed to die--at the front in France, with
the sound of the guns in his ears, guarded in his last moments by the
Ghurkas and the Sikhs of his beloved Indian contingent. But on this day
of our visit to him we found him a hale, kindly gentleman of eighty-two
who showed us his marvelous collection of firearms and Oriental relics
and the field guns, all historic guns by the way, which he kept upon the
terraces of his mansion house, and who told us, among other things, that
in his opinion our own Stonewall Jackson was perhaps the greatest
natural military genius the world had ever produced. Leaving his house
we stopped, on our return to London, at a hospital for soldiers in the
grounds of Ascot Race Course scarcely two miles from Lord Roberts'
place. The refreshment booths and the other rooms at the back and
underside of the five-shilling stand had been thrown together, except
the barber's shop, which was being converted into an operating chamber;
and, what with its tiled walls and high sloped ceiling and glass front,
the place made a first-rate hospital.
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