Become of our country, exclaims the British taxpayer, if this
frightful waste is to continue? What traveller or explorer ever carried
with him a copper warming-pan and a gigantic coal-box, weighing nearly
two hundred pounds? And these useless abominations are to hamper the
operations of our troops, and to wear out our sailors in the labour of
the disembarkment of such disgraceful lumber! Should we unhappily in
some future political annexation send a military force to Spitzbergen,
we shall probably omit the warming-pans and fuel, but supply a shipload
of refrigerators and "Family Ice Machines."
A number of these cast-iron coal-boxes had been converted into cisterns
by Sir Garnet Wolseley, which surrounded the wooden Government House at
Lefkosia, and were kept full of water in case of fire. So practical a
general would have been the first to condemn the palpable absurdity of
coal-boxes, even had coals been required; surely they could have been
laid upon the bare ground by the tent side, instead of causing the
inconvenience, labour, and ridicule of importing such outrageous
nonsense.
When the famous military invasions of Cyprus took place in historical
times there were certainly neither warming-pans nor coal-boxes, either
with Richard Coeur de Lion of England in 1191, or with the Turks under
Lala Mustafa in 1570.
