Last Saturday afternoon the Prince of Wales unveiled a memorial
to the officers and men of the Royal Marines who lost their lives in the South African and Chinese Campaigns. The monument, which stands opposite the new Admiralty buildings in St. James's Park, and is twenty-one feet high, has bronze figures of two Marines in fighting kit on the pedestal, bas-reliefs depicting scenes in South Africa and China, and a list of the names of the fallen,—seventy in all. The Prince of Wales in an excellent short speech commented on the appropriateness of the site, hard by the Admiralty and the Horse Guards, for a memorial to a corps whose motto implied that they served on both elements; and Lieutenant-General Arthur French, in recounting the achievements of the Marines in the two campaigns, recalled a very interesting fact in connection with one of the scenes depicted on the monument. This represents the repulse of one of the attacks on the Legations at Pekin. Of the three officers of the Royal Marines in the Legation at the beginning of the siege, one was killed and two were wounded. Hence it came about that on the occasion in question the men were under the command of Captain Myers, of the United States Marine Corps, and " were led to victory by one of our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic." It was in Chinese waters also, as our readers will remember, that Commodore Tattnall used and acted on the phrase, "Blood is thicker than water."
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