Melbourne Herald/1881/The late Thomas Holt White

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The late Thomas Holt White

'Atlas,' who is well-known to be identical with Mr Edmund Yates, thus writes in the World concerning a gentlemen who, adopting the nom-de-plume of Flaneur, was in some time a valued contributes to The Herald, and who died not long since :— In notice, In the list of deaths in a recent daily paper paper, an announcement of the death of "Thomas, eldest son of the late Algernon Holt White, of Clement's Hall Rochfort, Essex." Holt White's death has not been thought worth a paragraph, yet he was no common man, and had seen so common things, As the correspondent of the Now York Tribune in the Franco-German war, he stood on Hill of Frenols with the German King, when the day of true and Napoleon's letter came to that monarch up from out of the pandemonium of Sedan. The white rag that was the flag fall into White's hands, Grasping the splendor of his chance, he took his life in his hand and started across the reeking battlefield for the frontier and freedom to telegraph in Belgium. When he reached tho telegraph office in Brussels, the day after the battle, the people there gave him the pleasant alternative of being considered either a raving lunatic of a knave trying to influence the European Bourses by false news, and refused to forward his intelligence. So he came on to England ; and net many who read it can have forgotten the brief lurid story of the battle from his pen, which the Pall Mall Gazette printed on the evening but one after it was fought. Later he was present in Paris on journalistic duty during the whole of the Commune. He and Archibald Forbes were with Dombrowski in the Chateau de la Mouta on that Sunday afternoon when the Versaillists came streaming over the Communist defences; and these two journalists, when later in the same evening, Dombrowski was wounded near the gate of St. Cloud, dragged him cut of the melee, and saved his life for the time.