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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 41432
   :PG.Title: The Tale of a Field Hospital
   :PG.Released: 2012-11-21
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Frederick Treves
   :DC.Title: The Tale of a Field Hospital
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1912
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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THE TALE OF A FIELD HOSPITAL
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      Cover

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   .. _`Portrait of Frederick Treves`:

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      :alt: Portrait of Frederick Treves

      Portrait of Frederick Treves

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      THE TALE OF A
      FIELD HOSPITAL

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      BY
      SIR FREDERICK TREVES, BART.
      G.C.V.O., C.B., LL.D.

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      Late Consulting Surgeon with H.M. Troops in South Africa,
      Serjeant-Surgeon to H.M. the King, Author of "The
      Other Side of the Lantern," etc.

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      NEW EDITION

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      *WITH PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR*

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      CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
      London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
      1912

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      First Published *October* 1900
      *Reprinted November and December* 1900
      *February and August* 1901
      New Edition, *November* 1911

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   Preface to New Edition

The South African War, of which this Tale is told,
is already near to be forgotten, although there are
many to whom it still remains the most tragic
memory of their lives.

War is ever the same: an arena, aglare with
pomp and pageant, for the display of that most
elemental and most savage of human passions, the
lust to kill, as well as a dumb torture place where
are put to the test man's fortitude and his capacity
for the endurance of pain.

This brief narrative is concerned not with
shouting hosts in defiant array, but with the moaning
and distorted forms of men who have been "scorched
by the flames of war."  It deals with the grey hours
after the great, world-echoing display is over, with
the night that ends the gladiator's show, when the
arena is occupied only by the maimed, the dying
and the dead.

It is admitted that in the South African War
the medical needs of the Army were efficiently and
promptly supplied.  This account serves to show of
what kind is the work of the Red Cross in the field.
It may serve further to bring home to the reader
the appalling condition of the wounded in war
when--as in the present campaign in the Near East--the
provision for the care of the sick is utterly inadequate,
if not actually lacking.

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   FREDERICK TREVES.

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   THATCHED HOUSE LODGE,
   \       RICHMOND PARK, SURREY.
   *November*, 1912.

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   Preface to the First Edition

In this little book some account is given of a field
hospital which followed for three months the
Ladysmith Relief Column, from the time, in fact, that
that column left Frere until it entered the
long-beleaguered town.  The fragmentary record is based
upon notes written day by day on the spot.  Some
of the incidents related have been already recounted
in a series of letters published in the *British Medical
Journal*, and certain fragments of those letters are
reproduced in these pages, or have been amplified
under circumstances of greater leisure.

The account, such as it is, is true.

It may be that the story is a little sombre, and
possibly on occasions gruesome; but war, as viewed
from the standpoint of a field hospital, presents little
that is cheery.

It appears that some interest might attach to an
account of the manner in which our wounded faced
their troubles, and of the way in which they fared,
and under the influence of that impression this
imperfect sketch has been written.

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   CONTENTS

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   CHAPTER

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   1.  `The Field Hospital`_
   2.  `Frere Camp`_
   3.  `The Hospital Dog`_
   4.  `The Morning of Colenso`_
   5.  `The Hospital under the Ridge`_
   6.  `Inside an Operation-Tent`_
   7.  `The Surgeons of the Field Hospitals`_
   8.  `A Professional Visit by Rail`_
   9.  `The Hospital Train at Colenso`_
   10.  `The Nurses at Chieveley`_
   11.  `Some Traits in the Men`_
   12.  `The Sign of the Wooden Cross`_
   13.  `The Men with the Spades`_
   14.  `The Marching`_
   15.  `Spearman's Farm`_
   16.  `The Hospital at Spearman's`_
   17.  `The Two White Lights`_
   18.  `After Spion Kop`_
   19.  `The Story of the Restless Man`_
   20.  `"Did We Win?"`_
   21.  `The Fighting Spirit`_
   22.  `The Body-Snatchers`_
   23.  `Seeing Them Off`_
   24.  `A Funeral at Spearman's`_
   25.  `Absent-Mindedness`_
   26.  `At Chieveley Again`_
   27.  `A Journey to Ladysmith`_
   28.  `A Straggler`_
   29.  `How a Surgeon Won the Victoria Cross`_
   30.  `"SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI"`_

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.. _`THE FIELD HOSPITAL`:

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   THE TALE OF
   A FIELD HOSPITAL

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   I

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   THE FIELD HOSPITAL

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The Field Hospital, of which some account is given
in these pages, was known as "No. 4 Stationary
Field Hospital."  The term "stationary" is hardly
appropriate, since the Hospital moved with the
column, and, until at least the relief of Ladysmith,
it followed the Headquarters' camp.  The term,
however, serves to distinguish "No. 4" from the smaller
field hospitals which were attached to the various
brigades, and which were much more mobile and
more restless.

At the commencement of the campaign the
capacity of the Hospital was comparatively small.
The officers in charge were Major Kirkpatrick, Major
Mallins, and Lieutenant Simson, all of the Royal
Army Medical Corps.  These able officers--and none
could have been more efficient--were, I regret to
say, all invalided as the campaign progressed.

Before the move was made to Spearman's Farm
the Hospital was enlarged, and the staff was
increased by the addition of eight civil surgeons.  It
is sad to report that of these two died in the camp
and others were invalided.  No men could have
worked better together than did the army surgeons
and their civilian colleagues.

The greatest capacity of the Hospital was reached
after the battle of Spion Kop, when we had in our
tents about 800 wounded.

Some account of the nurses who accompanied
the Hospital is given in a section which follows.

The Hospital was well equipped, and the supplies
were ample.  We carried with us a large number
of iron bedsteads complete with mattresses, blankets,
and sheets.  These were all presented to the Hospital
by Mr. Acutt, a generous merchant at Durban.  It
is needless to say that they proved an inexpressible
boon, and even when the Hospital had to trust only
to ox transport, all the bedsteads went with it.

The ladies of the colony, moreover, worked
without ceasing to supply the wounded with
comforts, and "No. 4" had reason to be grateful for
their well-organised kindness.

The precise number of patients who were treated
in the Hospital is no doubt recorded in the proper
quarter, but some idea of the work accomplished
may be gained from the fact that practically all the
wounded in the Natal campaign--from the battle of
Colenso to the relief of Ladysmith--passed through
No. 4 Stationary Field Hospital.  The exceptions
were represented by the few cases sent down direct
by train or ambulance from the smaller field hospitals.





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.. _`FRERE CAMP`:

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   II


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   FRERE CAMP

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It was from Frere Camp that the army under General
Buller started for the Tugela River, and the
Hospital pitched its tents in that camp on the evening
of Monday, December 11th, 1899.  We went up
from Pietermaritzburg by train.  The contents were
soon emptied out on the line, some little way
outside Frere Station, and close to the railway the
Hospital was put up.  That night we all slept
under canvas--many for the first time--and all
were well pleased that we had at last arrived at
the front.

Frere is merely a station on the line of rail which
traverses Natal, and as it consists only of some three
or four houses and a few trees it can hardly be
dignified by the name of hamlet.  Frere is simply
a speck--a corrugated iron oasis--on the vast
undulating plains of the veldt.  These plains roll away
to the horizon, and are broken only by kopjes and
dongas and the everlasting ant-hills.

On the way towards Ladysmith are a few kopjes
of large size, from any one of which the line of the
Tugela can be seen, with the hills beyond, occupied
by the Boer entrenchments, and over them again
the hills which dominate Ladysmith.  On the way
towards Estcourt winds a brown road, along which
an endless train of ox-wagons rumble and are lost
in the wilderness of the camp.

The river which is reputed to "run" through
Frere has long since ceased to run.  The water is
retained by certain dams, and the pools thus formed
are uninviting.  The water is the colour of
pea-soup, and when in a glass is semi-opaque and of
a faint brownish colour.  The facetious soldier, as
he drinks it, calls it "khaki and water."

In the lowest pool, immediately above the iron
railway bridge which has been blown up by the
Boers, Tommy Atkins bathes with gusto in what
is seemingly a light-coloured mud.  Here also he
washes his socks and his shirts.

The centre of the camp is the railway station,
and that of Frere is the smallest and most
unpretending that any hamlet could pretend to.  It is,
however, crowded out of all reason, and its
platform of hard earth is covered with boxes and baggage
and sacks and saddles in as much disorder as if
they had been thrown in panic from a burning train.
Between the little goods shed and the little booking-office
are several stands of rifles.  A sentry, proud
apparently in his covering of dust, is parading one
end of the platform, while at the other end a motley
crowd of perspiring soldiers are filling water-bottles
at the tank which supplies the engine.  In the
waiting-room a tumbled mass of men are asleep on
the floor, while on a bench in front of it two
men-of-war's men are discussing an English paper six
weeks old.

Outside the station are ramparts of provision
boxes and cases of ammunition, and iron water
cisterns and mealie bags, and to the fragments
of a railing which surrounds the station horses,
of all kinds and in all stages of weariness, are tied.

A ragged time-table on the wall, dealing with
the train service to Pretoria, and with the precise
hour of the arrival of the trains there, seems but a
sorry jest.  The stationmaster's house has been
looted, and the little garden in front of it has
been trampled out of being, save for two or
three red geraniums which still bloom amidst
the dirt.  This house is, for the time, the
general's headquarters, and before it waves the
Union Jack.

When we reached the camp it was stated that
30,000 men were under canvas.  A camp of this
size must of necessity present an endless scene of
bustle and movement.  Nothing seemed at rest but
the interminable array of white tents and the rows
of baggage wagons.  Cavalry would be moving in
one direction and infantry in another.  Here a
mounted patrol would be riding out or a couple of
scouts coming in.  There would be a long line of
Kaffirs carrying bales and boxes to a temporary
depot, and here a troop of eager horses hurrying
to the river to drink.  Gallopers would be seen in
all directions, and everywhere would be struggling
teams of oxen or of mules enveloped in clouds of
dust and urged on by sweating men and strange
oaths, and by the shrill yells of the Kaffir drivers,
whose dust-dried throats gave out noises like the
shrieks of parrots.

There was no shade of any kind, and the camp
during the day lay dry, dusty, parched and
restless under a blazing sun, but at night there
was a cool wind and cheery camp fires, and a
darkness which blotted out the dusty roads, the
dried-up river, the dismal piles of stores, and
the general picture of a camp in a desert of
baked earth.

Every night a search-light was at work sending
dispatches to Ladysmith, and almost every morning
could be heard the Boer guns thundering over that
unhappy place.

The British soldier looked very smart in his khaki
suit when embarking at Southampton, but at Frere
he showed the effects of wear, and his tunic, his
belt, his pouches, his boots and his face, had all
toned down to one uniform tint of dirt colour.  He
was of the earth earthy.  He was unshaven.  His
clothes had that abject look of want of "fit" that is
common to clothes which have been slept in, which
have been more than once soaked through, and
which have more than once dried upon the body of
the owner.





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.. _`THE HOSPITAL DOG`:

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   III


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   THE HOSPITAL DOG

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Prominent among the *personnel* of the Hospital
should be placed "Durban," the Hospital dog.  He
was a brindled bull terrier of exceptional physique
and intelligence, and the story about him was that
he was a refugee dog who had attached himself
to "No. 4" at Durban, and that for want of a
better name he had been called after that pleasant town.

He had a great love of adventure, and fell into
the life of a moving camp with gusto.  His good
temper and his placid appreciation of a practical
joke were among his many excellent qualities.  When
the orderlies were paraded on the platform of
Pietermaritzburg Station, previous to their being entrained
for Frere, "Durban" took his place in the ranks
with no little dignity.

The orderlies were devoted to him and he to
them, and I have no doubt that, pampered and
humoured in every canine whim, he is with the Hospital still.

"Durban" had had a special collar made for him
on which was emblazoned the red cross and the
name of his company.  Just before starting for
Chieveley his particular master made him a pair
of putties, in which his fore legs were enveloped.
He was uncommonly pleased with these embarrassing
articles of clothing, and was never tired of
going round the camp to show them to his many
admirers.  At Spearman's he was provided with a
travelling kit, consisting of a waterproof cape with
two minute panniers on either side, marked with
the red cross, and furnished with unappreciated
surgical dressings.  This exquisite outfit was with
difficulty secured in position, and in the early stages
of a march was sure to be found dangling beneath
"Durban's" ample chest.

His passion for bathing was only equalled by
his passion for catching flies, and when we reached
the Lesser Tugela he would join party after party
on their way to the river, and would bathe as
long and as often as he found anyone to bathe with.

He was useful, too, as a watch-dog, and
performed no mean services in connection with the
commissariat department.  Some sheep were given
to the Hospital, and for a day or two it was a
problem as to how advantage could be taken of this
important supply of food.  The sheep, when wanted
for the kitchen, could not be caught, and could
not be shot, and so "Durban" was appealed to in
the difficulty.  Accompanied by the cook, on certain
mornings "Durban" made his way to the little
flock out on the veldt, and never failed to pull down
a sheep.  He followed the cook and the sheep back
to the camp with the air of one who deserved well
of his country.





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.. _`THE MORNING OF COLENSO`:

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   IV


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   THE MORNING OF COLENSO

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At daybreak on the morning of December 15th the
Field Hospital was already astir.  While it was
yet dark the silence of the camp was broken in
upon by the rousing of the orderlies, by much
slapping upon the sides of silent tents, by much
stumbling over darkened tent ropes, and by sudden
calls of "Get up, you chaps," "Tumble out,"
"Chuck yourselves about."  "Why don't you wake
a man up?" cries out one peevish voice among
the recently roused.  "Why don't you make a
noise?" says another in sleepy tones.  "Is the whole
camp afire and is the Boers on us, or is this your
idea of calling a gentleman?" mutters a sarcastic
man, as he puts his head out of the fly of his tent.

In a few minutes everyone in the camp is on
the move, for there is little needed to complete a
toilet beyond the tightening of a belt and the pulling
on of a pair of boots.  All are in the best of spirits,
and the collecting together of goods and chattels
and the preparing of a hurried breakfast proceed
amidst infinite chatter and many camp pleasantries.
We are at last on the move.  We are the last
to go.  This is the day of the long expected battle,
and we are to push on to the front.  The real
fighting is to begin, and there is not a man who
is not possessed by the conviction that the Boers
will to-day be swept from the Tugela--if they have
not already fled--and that General Buller will have
a "walk over."

One cannot but be reminded, many times since,
that the advance to Ladysmith was always spoken
of as a "walk over."

Moreover, everyone is glad to leave Frere--dreary,
sweltering Frere.  Since the column left
it has become a waste of desolation; the very grass
has been already worn away, and there is nothing
but an expanse of bald earth, scarred with the
landmarks of a camp that was, glistening with
empty meat and biscuit tins which flash in the
sun, and dotted over with a rabble of debris.  The
picturesque cavalry camp, with its rows of restless
horses, is now only indicated by more or less formal
lines of dirtier dirt.  The avenues and squares of
white tents are gone, and in their place is a khaki
waste covered with the most melancholy of refuse.

At the outskirts of great towns there is usually,
in a place or two, a desert plot of land marked
off by disreputable relics of a fence and trodden
into barren earth by innumerable untidy feet.  If
such a plot be diversified with occasional ash heaps,
with derelict straw, and with empty tins and
bottomless pots and pans, it will represent in miniature
the great camp of Frere after the column had moved
to the river.

Frere was indeed no longer Frere.  It had
become suddenly quiet, and the depressed garrison
left behind were almost too listless to watch, with
suitable jealousy, our preparations for departure.

On this particular morning the sun rose gloriously.
Out of the gloom there emerged rapidly the grey
heights of the far-off Drachenbergs, and as the
light of the dawn fell full upon them, their ashen
precipices and pinnacles became rose-coloured and
luminous; and the terraces of green which marked
the foot of each line of barren cliff seemed so near
and so strangely lit that many a man, busy in the
work of striking camp, stopped to gaze on these
enchanted mountains.  The whole range, however,
looks chilled and barren--as barren, as solitary, as
unearthly as the mountains of the moon.

Before the peaks of the Drachenbergs were well
alight the boom of our great guns sounded with
startling clearness, and it was evident that the
prelude for the battle had begun.

In due course a train of goods wagons backed
down to the side of the hospital.  The tents and
countless panniers, boxes, sacks, and miscellaneous
chattels of the hospital were packed upon the trucks.
Our instructions were to proceed by train to Colenso,
and to there unload and camp.  There was apparently
no doubt but that the village by the Tugela would
immediately be in our hands.  Early rumours
reached us, indeed, that the Boers had fled, and
that no living thing was to be seen on the heights
beyond the river.  These rumours were soon to be
discredited by the incessant roar of cannon, and
later by the barking of the "pom-pom" and the
minor patter of rifle firing.

Four nurses were to go with the train: the two
who had accompanied me from London, Miss
McCaul and Miss Tarr, and two army sisters from
Netley, Sister Sammut and Sister Martin.

While the train was being loaded the nurses
waited at the hotel or store.  The hotel, a little
unpretending bungalow, represented one of the
three or four dwellings which made up the
settlement of Frere.  It was kept by Mr. and
Mrs. Wilson, to whose hospitality we were, on this and
other occasions, much indebted.  Mr. Wilson and
his family were excellent representatives of the many
sturdy and loyal colonists who are to be found
throughout Natal.  When the Boers approached
Frere they were compelled to fly to the south, and
when they returned to what had once been a home,
they found such a wreck of a house as only Boers
can effect.  Everything had been looted that could
be looted, and what could not be removed had been
ruthlessly broken up.  Even the books in the ample
book-case had been torn to pieces.  The empty
rooms were filled with filth and wreckage, and
nothing had escaped the obscene hands of these
malicious marauders.  Every cupboard had been
torn open and, if possible, torn down; every drawer
had been rifled of its contents; and on the floor,
among fragments of broken chairs and crockery and
discarded articles of clothing, would be found a
photograph of a child, trampled out of recognition,
or some small keepsake which had little value but
its associations.  The Boers, indeed, do not stop
at mere looting, but mark their visits by fiendish
malice and by a savage mischievousness which
would not be unworthy of an escaped baboon.

The train carrying the hospital and its possessions
moved on to Frere Station, where it took up
the equipment of officers and men.  There was a
passenger carriage with one compartment in which
were accommodated the nurses and three others.
The officers, sergeants, and orderlies rode on the
piles of baggage which filled the open trucks.

The day was blazing hot, and thirst proportionate.
The heat oppressed one with the sense of
something that had weight.  Any breeze that moved
was heavy with heat.

At last we started for the actual front, full of
expectancy and in the best of spirits.  The distance
to Chieveley is about seven miles across the veldt,
across the trestle bridge, and past the wreck of the
armoured train.  The train moved up the incline to
Chieveley very slowly, and as we approached the
higher ground it struck us all that the incessant
artillery and rifle firing, and the constantly repeated
crack of the "pom-pom," were hardly consistent
with the much-emphasised "walk-over."

Outside Chieveley Station, the station of which
we were to see so much later on, the crawling train
stopped, and a galloper came up with a message
requesting me to go down to the battlefield at once.
At the same time, Major Brazier-Creagh, who was
in charge of the hospital train, and who was always
as near the front as he could get, came up and told
us that things were going badly at Colenso, that
we had lost several guns, and that the wounded
were coming in in scores.





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.. _`THE HOSPITAL UNDER THE RIDGE`:

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   V


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   THE HOSPITAL UNDER THE RIDGE

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My wagon and mules were already at Chieveley
when the train reached that place, and I was able
to start for the scene of action without a moment's
delay.

From Chieveley the grass-covered veldt slopes
evenly to the Tugela and to Colenso village, which
lies upon its southern bank.  This slope, some few
miles from Chieveley, is broken by a long ridge,
upon which the 4.7 naval guns were placed.  From
this ridge the whole battlefield could be viewed.

Under the shelter of the ridge, and close to the
great guns, four little field hospitals were pitched,
and here I made my first acquaintance with the
circumstances of war.  Each field hospital would
be represented by a small central marquee, which
formed an operating and dressing station, and a
number of bell tents around it, which would
accommodate in all about one hundred patients.

When I arrived the ambulances were already
coming in--the dreary ambulances, each one with
a load of suffering, misery, and death!  Each
wagon was drawn by ten mules and driven by a
Kaffir, and over the dusty hood of each the red
cross flag waved in the shimmering heat.  They
came along slowly, rocking and groaning over the
uneven veldt like staggering men, and each drew
up at one or other of the little hospitals under the
ridge.  Every ambulance carried a certain number
of wounded men who were well enough to sit up,
and a smaller number who were lying on stretchers--the
"sitting up" and "lying down" cases, as they
were respectively called.  Those who could move
themselves were soon helped down from the wagon
by willing hands, while the stretchers were taken
out by relays of trained bearers.

What a spectacle it was!  These were the very
khaki-clad soldiers who had, not so long ago, left
Waterloo, spick and span, amid a hurricane of
cheers, and now they were coming back to camp
silent and listless, and scarcely recognisable as men.
They were burnt a brown red by the sun, their
faces were covered with dust and sweat, and were
in many cases blistered by the heat; their hands
were begrimed; some were without tunics, and the
blue army shirts they wore were stiff with blood.
Some had helmets and some were bare-headed.  All
seemed dazed, weary, and depressed.

Their wounds were of all kinds, and many had
been shot in more places than one.  Here was a
man nursing a shattered arm in the blood-stained
rags of a torn-up sleeve.  There was another with
his head bandaged up and his face painted with
black streaks of dried blood, holding a crushed
helmet beneath his arm like a collapsible opera hat.

Some still gripped their rifles or dragged their
bandoliers along as they limped to the tents.  Many
were wandering about aimlessly.  All were parched
with thirst, for the heat was extreme.  Here a man
with a bandaged, bootless foot would be hopping
along with the aid of his gun, while another with
his eyes covered up would be clinging to the tunic
of a comrade who could see his way to the tents.
One or two of those who were lying on the ground
were vomiting, while near by a poor fellow, who
had been shot through the lung, was coughing up blood.

All around the operation-marquee men were
sitting and lying on the ground, waiting for their
turn at the surgeon's hands; while here would be
a great heap of dusty rifles, and there a pile of
discarded accoutrements, tunics and boots, and
elsewhere a medley of boxes, panniers, canteen tins,
cooking pots, and miscellaneous baggage.  A few
helmets were lying about which had probably
dropped off the stretchers, or had been removed from
the dead, for some of them were blood-stained and
crushed out of shape, or riddled with holes.

The saddest cases among the wounded were those
on the stretchers, and the stretchers were lying on
the ground everywhere, and on each was a soldier
who had been "hard hit."  Some of those on the
stretchers were already dead, and some kindly hand
had drawn a jacket over the poor, dust-stained face.
One or two were delirious, and had rolled off their
stretchers on to the ground; others were strangely
silent, and at most were trying to shade their eyes
from the blinding sun.  One man, who was
paralysed below the waist from a shot in the spine,
was repeatedly raising up his head in order to look
with persisting wonder and curiosity at limbs which
he could not move and in which he could not feel.
Here and there groups of dusty men, who had been
but slightly wounded, were sitting on the ground
together, too tired and too depressed even to talk,
or at most muttering a word or two now and then
in a whisper.

Overworked orderlies were busy everywhere.
Some were heating water or soup over the camp
fires; others were hurrying round to each wounded
man with water and bread.  The majority were
occupied in helping the injured to the tents or were
concerned in attempting to relieve those who seemed
in most distress.

The surgeons in their shirt-sleeves were working
for their lives.  Some were busy in the operation-marquee,
while others were going from man to man
among the crowd upon the ground, giving morphia,
adjusting limbs, and hurrying each of the wounded
into the shelter of a tent with as much speed as
possible.  Yet, although the whole ground seemed
covered with stricken men, the dismal ambulances
were still crawling in, and far over the veldt the
red cross flag of other wagons could be seen
moving slowly up to the naval ridge.

Would this procession of wagons never end!

Besides the ambulances there was the Volunteer
Bearer Company, organised by Colonel
Gallwey, C.B.  The men of this Company were now
tramping in in a long, melancholy line made up of
little groups of six slowly moving figures carrying
a stretcher between them, and on each stretcher was
a khaki mass that rocked as the stretcher rocked,
and that represented a British soldier badly wounded,
possibly dying, possibly dead.

Above the hubbub of the swarming hospitals
was still to be heard the boom of the accursed guns.

In the rear the whistle and puff of a train at
Chieveley sounded curiously out of place, and about
the outskirts of the hospital some outspanned oxen
were grazing as unconcernedly as if they were
wandering in a meadow in England.  Over all was
the blazing sun and the blinding sky.

Late in the afternoon a thunderstorm passed
overhead, and when the rain came down the wounded,
who were lying on the grass, were covered over
with the waterproof ground-sheets which were used
in the tents.  This did little to mitigate the
grimness of the occasion.  There was, indeed, something
very uncanny in the covered-up figures, in the array
of tarpaulins glistening with rain, and beneath
which some of the wounded lay motionless, while
others moved uneasily.

No pen, however, can fitly describe this scene
at the foot of the ridge.  Here was a picture of
the horrors of war, and however accustomed an
onlooker may have been to the scenes among
which a surgeon moves, few could have wished
other than that the circumstances of this day would
be blotted out of all memory.  I could not fail to
be reminded over and over again of the remark
made by many who were leaving England when I
left to the effect that they hoped they would reach
the Cape "in time for the fun."  Well, we *were*
in time, but if this was "fun" it was humour of a
kind too ghastly for contemplation.

If of this dismal scene there was much to be
forgotten, there was at least one feature which can
never be forgot, and that was the heroism with
which the soldier met his "ill luck."  The best and
the worst of a man, so far as courage and unselfishness
are concerned, come out when he is hard hit,
and without doubt each one of the wounded at
Colenso "took his licking like a man."  Bravery
in the heat and tumult of battle is grand enough,
but here in the dip behind the gun hill, and within
the unromantic lines of a field hospital, was a
display of grim pluck, which showed itself only in
tightened faces, clenched teeth, and firmly knit
fingers.  Among the stricken crowd who had
reached the shelter of the hospital there was many
a groan, but never a word of complaint, never a
sign of whining, nor a token of fear.  Some were
a little disposed to curse, and a few to be jocular,
but they all faced what had to be like men.

They were not only uncomplaining and unselfish,
but grateful and reasonable.  There was no
grumbling (no "grousing," as Tommy calls it), no
carping criticism.  As one man said, pointing to
the over-worked surgeons in the operation-tent,
"They will do the best they can for the blooming
lot of us, and that's good enough for me."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`INSIDE AN OPERATION-TENT`:

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   VI


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   INSIDE AN OPERATION-TENT

.. vspace:: 2

There were four operation-marquees pitched under
the naval ridge on the day of Colenso, one
connected with each of the field hospitals.  There is
little about these marquees or about the work done
in the shadow of them that is of other than
professional interest.  They were crowded, and
overcrowded, on December 15th, and the surgeons who
worked in them worked until they were almost too
tired to stand.  Every preparation had been
completed hours before the first wounded man arrived,
and the equipment of each hospital was ample and
excellent.  To my thinking, a great surgical
emergency, great beyond any expectation, was never
more ably met than was this on the day of the first
battle.

The marquee is small.  It accommodates the
operation-table in the centre between the two poles,
while along the sides are ranged the field panniers
which serve as tables for instruments and dressings.

It is needless to say that the operation-tent is
very unlike an operating theatre in a London
hospital, but then the open veldt is very unlike the
Metropolis.  The floor of the tent is much-trodden
grass, and, indeed, much-stained grass, for what
drips upon it cannot be wiped up.  There are no
bright brass water-taps, but there is a brave display
of buckets and tin basins.  Water is precious, more
precious than any other necessity, for every drop
has to be brought by train from Frere.

There is little room in the tent for others than
the surgeon, his assistant, the anæsthetist, and a
couple of orderlies.  The surgeon is in his
shirtsleeves, and his dress is probably completed by
riding breeches and a helmet.  The trim nurses,
with their white caps and aprons, who form the
gentlest element in the hospital theatre, are replaced
by orderlies, men with burnt sienna complexions and
unshaven chins, who are clad in the unpicturesque
army shirt, in shorts, putties, and the inevitable
helmet or "squasher" hat.  They are, however,
strong in the matter of belts, which vary from a
leather strap or piece of string to an elaborate girdle,
worked, no doubt, by the hands of some cherished
maiden.  From the belt will probably be hanging
a big knife or a tin-opener, in place of the nurse's
chatelaine, and from the breeches pocket may be
projecting the bowl of a pipe.  The orderly in a
field hospital--who is for the most part a "good
sort"--look's a little like one of the *dramatis personæ*
of Bret Harte's tales, and is a curious substitute
for the immaculate dresser and the dainty nurse.

Still, appearances do not count for much, and
the officers and men of the Royal Army Medical
Corps did as sterling good work on December 15th
as any body of men could do, and they were
certainly not hampered by the lack of a precise
professional garb.

The wounded are brought into the marquee one
by one.  Not all are cases for operation, but all have
to be examined, and an examination is more easily
carried out on a table than on a stretcher or the
bare ground.  Moreover, to make the examination
painless, an anæsthetic is usually required.  I wonder
how much chloroform and morphia were used on
that day, and on the night and day that followed!
The drugs would fill one scale of a balance in the
other scale of which would be found the dull weight
of pain they were destined to obliterate.  The
horrors of war are to some small extent to be
measured by the lists of the wounded and the dead,
but a more graphic representation would be provided
by the hideous total of the drops of chloroform
and the grains of morphia which have come from
the surgeon's store.

The flies of the operation-marquee are wide open,
for the heat is intense, and access must be easy.
As it is, there is much mopping of brows and many
"pulls" of dirty lukewarm water from precious
water-bottles.  Unhappily the scenes within the
shadow of the canvas cannot be quite hidden from
those who are lying in the sun outside waiting their
turn.  As one man after another is carried in there
is sure to be some comrade on the ground who will
call out as the stretcher goes by: "Keep yer chivey
up, Joe"; "Don't be down on your luck"; "They
will do you a treat"; "Good luck to yer, old cock,
you won't feel nothing."

One instance of the limited capacity of the
marquee I may be pardoned for recounting.  The
amputation of a leg was in progress when the
pressure of work was at its height.  Beneath the table
at the time of the operation was the prostrate figure
of a man.  He had been shot through the face.  His
big moustache was clotted with blood, his features
were obliterated by dust and blood, his eyes were
shut, and his head generally was enveloped in
bandages.  I thought he was dead, and that in the
hurry of events he was merely awaiting removal.
The limb after amputation was unfortunately dropped
upon this apparently inanimate figure when, to my
horror, the head was raised and the eyes were opened
to ascertain the nature of the falling body.  This
poor fellow was attended to as soon as the table
was free.  I was glad to see him some weeks after
in the Assembly Hotel at Pietermaritzburg hearty
and well.  He was a gallant officer in a Natal
regiment, and when I recalled this gruesome incident
to him, he owned that, feeble as he was at the time,
it gave him a "shake up."





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.. _`THE SURGEONS OF THE FIELD HOSPITALS`:

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   VII


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   THE SURGEONS OF THE FIELD HOSPITALS

.. vspace:: 2

Among the many officers of the R.A.M.C. I must
confess that my strongest sympathies are with those
who are in charge of the little field hospitals.  These
handy hospitals have their own transport, and move
with the various brigades or divisions.  The officers
who command them have little comfort, little rest,
the least luxurious mess, and the hardest of work.
They bear the brunt of the campaign so far as the
medical and surgical needs of the Army are
concerned.  They must be always ready, always at
hand, prepared to be full of patients one day and
empty the next; and those whose lives are spent
with them can certainly claim that they have "no
abiding city."

The officers in charge of these hospitals are
picked men, but as sound experience is necessary
they are often men who are no longer young, and
who may claim that they have already had their
share of roughing it.  They are, perhaps, more than
any others, the most exposed to criticism.  If
anything goes wrong at the front a large proportion of
the blame falls upon them, and if all goes well their
names appear in no roll of honour.

No surgeon who saw these men could be other
than proud that he belonged to the same profession
as they did.  Of their work at Colenso, at
Spearman's Farm, and before Pieters I can only say
that it was, to my thinking, a credit to the medical
department of any army.





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.. _`A PROFESSIONAL VISIT BY RAIL`:

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   VIII


.. class:: center medium

   A PROFESSIONAL VISIT BY RAIL

.. vspace:: 2

After a busy afternoon among the field hospitals
under the naval ridge, I returned in the evening to
Chieveley, in the hope, now that the bulk of the
work was over, of getting something to eat.  I had
not been at Chieveley long when an orderly arrived
with a letter to tell me that Lieutenant Roberts had
been brought in wounded, and to ask me to go
back to the naval hill at once.  It was now dark,
and I had at that time no horse.  However, the
hospital train was standing in the station, and to
the fertile brain of Major Brazier-Creagh, who was
in charge of the train, it occurred that we might
detach the engine and go down on it to the ridge,
since the field hospitals were close to the railway.

There was the difficulty, however, that the line
was a single line, and a water train had already
steamed down to the ridge, and was expected back
at any moment.  It was the simple problem of an
engine on the one hand, and of a train on the other,
proceeding in different directions at night on a
single line of rail.

The case being urgent, the engine was detached
and we started.  Major Brazier-Creagh and Captain
Symonds came with me.  It so happened that we
went tender first.  The railway line appeared to us
to go up and down with many undulations, and at
the top of each rise we expected to meet the water
train.  Fortunately the moon was coming up, and
the blackness which oppressed us was fading a little.
We proceeded slowly, with much whistling and
considerable waving of a red lamp.  At last there
was made out the dim outline of the water train
coming towards us at a fair speed.  We stopped,
and there were redoubled efforts in the direction of
whistling, lamp waving, and shouting.  These
exhibitions had an immediate effect upon the water
train, which, after some hysterical whistling,
stopped and backed promptly out of sight.  The
driver told us afterwards that he thought a whole
train was coming down upon him at full speed, and
that he might well have backed down into Colenso.

We got out some way above the ridge and
walked on to the field hospital I had so lately left.
The gallant officer I came to see was comfortably
bestowed in a tent, was quite free from pain and
anxiety, and was disposed to sleep.  From a surgical
point of view the case was hopeless, and had been
hopeless from the first, and no idea of an operation
could be entertained.  Our examination and our
discussion of the case with Major Hamilton, R.A.M.C.,
under whose care the patient was, occupied some
time, and the engine had long since gone back to
Chieveley.  There was nothing to be done but to
sleep on the ground in the open, and this we
proceeded to do, lying down on the grass outside the
tent we had just visited.  There was no hardship
in this, as it was a splendid night, and the full moon
had risen and had flooded the whole country with a
spectral light.

As if by magic the restless, hurrying, motley
crowd of the earlier day had vanished.  A cool breeze
and pleasant shadows had replaced the heat and the
glare of the sun; a gentle silence had blotted out the
noise and the turmoil; and of the scene of the
afternoon there was nothing left but the white tents
gleaming in the moon, the open veldt, and the shadow
of the ridge.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE HOSPITAL TRAIN AT COLENSO`:

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   IX


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   THE HOSPITAL TRAIN AT COLENSO

.. vspace:: 2

The battle of Colenso was fought on Friday,
December 15th, and on Saturday, the 16th, an
armistice was declared for the burying of the dead.
Very early on Saturday morning, while it was yet
moonlight, the hospital train backed down from
Chieveley and came to a stand as near the field
hospitals as possible.  As soon as it was daylight
(and at this time of the summer the sun rose before
five) the loading of the train commenced.

The filling up of a hospital train is no easy
business, and affords a somewhat depressing sight.

The worst cases are dealt with first, and a long
line of stretchers soon began to pour from the
hospital tents to the railway.  The stretchers are put
down on the railroad close to the wheels of the train.
On this particular morning it so happened that
the carriages threw a shadow on the side of the
line towards the hospital, so that the stretchers, if
near the metals, were in the shade.

Many of the wounded had had no sleep, and
many were developing some degree of fever.  A few
had become delirious, and were difficult to control.
With the stretcher parties would come a certain
number of such of the wounded as could walk, and
very soon a not inconsiderable crowd was gathered
in the shade of the train.

But what a crowd!  The same sunburnt men
with blistered faces, but now even a more motley
gathering than filled the field hospitals the day
before--a gathering made piteously picturesque by
khaki rags, blue bandages, casual splints, arm slings,
eye bandages, slit-up trousers, and dressings of all
kinds.  Here they came crowding to the train, some
limping, some hopping, some helped along between
two stronger comrades, some staggering on alone.  A
man with a damaged arm assisting a man with a
bullet through his leg.  A man stopping on the
way to be sick, cheered up by another with a
bandaged eye.

An untidy, sorrowful crowd, with unbuttoned
tunics and slovenly legs, with unlaced boots, with
blood on their khaki jackets and on their blue shirts
and on their stiffening dressings.  The gentle hand
of the nurse had not as yet busied itself with this
unkempt and unwashed throng.  There had been no
time for washing nor for changing of garments,
and if the surgeon has had to cut the coat and the
shirt into rags, the wearer must wear the rags or
nothing; and as for washing, it is a sin to wash
when water is priceless.

The greater number of those who come to the
railway line are carried there on stretchers, but all
who are well enough to take any interest in the
journey are eager not to miss a place in the train.

The business of getting the "lying down" cases
into the carriages is considerable, and everybody
lends a hand, the surgeons being the most active
of any.  The berths in the train are placed one above
the other, and the room for manipulating stretchers
is small.  The equipment of the train was very
complete, and every luxury was at hand, from hot
soup to iced "lemon-squash," and even to champagne.
Many generous ladies in the Colony had seen that
the train should want for nothing, and Major Brazier-Creagh
took as much pride in his travelling hospital
as if he had built it himself.

Innumerable instances came under my notice of
the unselfishness of the soldier, and of his solicitude
for his friends in distress.  It was by the side of
this hospital train that occurred an episode I have
recorded elsewhere, and which may well be described
again.  An orderly was bringing some water to a
wounded man lying on the ground near me.  He
was shot through the abdomen, and he could hardly
speak owing to the dryness of his mouth, but he
said: "Take it to my pal first, he is worse hit than
me."  This generous lad died next morning, but his
pal got through and is doing well.

Another poor fellow, who was much troubled with
vomiting, and who was indeed dying, said, as he was
being hoisted into the train, "Put me in the lower
berth, because I keep throwing up."  How many
people troubled merely with sea-sickness would be
as thoughtful as he was?  He died not long before
we reached Chieveley.

Lieutenant Roberts, whom I had visited at
intervals, went up by this train, and was placed in
No. 4 Field Hospital at Chieveley.  Here a
bedstead, with a comfortable mattress and white sheets,
was waiting ready for him.

As the train moved off it was sad to note that
a few who had been brought down to the rail in the
hope of a place being found for them, had to be
left behind, and had to be carried back to the tents
to await some other means of transport.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE NURSES AT CHIEVELEY`:

.. class:: center large

   X


.. class:: center medium

   THE NURSES AT CHIEVELEY

.. vspace:: 2

The train which brought up No. 4 Field Hospital
from Frere was stopped, as I have already said, at
Chieveley.  The tents and baggage were thrown out,
and with as much haste as possible the hospital was
pitched on the open ground, close to the station.
Before, however, more than a few tents could be put
up the wounded began to arrive.  They came in all
Friday evening, and all Saturday, and all Saturday
evening.  The field hospitals by the naval hill had
soon been filled, and all cases that could be sent on
to Chieveley were sent there, while as many as could
go at once to the base were taken down by the
hospital train.

Saturday was a day of truce, but at sundown on
Saturday not only had all the wounded to be cleared
out from the field hospitals, but those hospitals
themselves had to move, as, with the renewal of hostilities,
they would be in a place of danger.  Chieveley was
therefore soon filled to overflowing.

There were three army surgeons with "No. 4"
whose names I have already mentioned.  They were
reinforced by a small field hospital under the charge
of Major Baird and Captain Begbie.

Some of the wounded came up by train, and
some by ambulances or by wagons, but a very large
proportion, a proportion which included nearly all
the serious cases, were carried up on stretchers by
hand.  No mode of transport is more comfortable
than this, or is less fatiguing to the patient, and
the splendid organisation of volunteer bearers and
of coolie carriers enabled this means of bringing up
the wounded to be very largely made use of.  Certainly
the stretcher-bearers were the means of saving
lives, and of sparing those they carried an infinite
amount of pain.

As seen at night, the procession up to Chieveley
was doleful and mysterious.  The long line of silent
men moving in clusters, each cluster with a stretcher
and a body in its midst.  Stealing slowly and
cautiously over the veldt in the moonlight, they all
made for the two white lights which swung over
the hospital by the station.

The coolies carried their stretchers shoulder high,
so that the body of the man they bore was lit
fitfully by the moon as they passed along with
absolutely noiseless feet.  The coolies themselves added
no little to the uncanny spectacle, for in the shadow
beneath the stretcher stalked a double row of thin
bare legs, and by the poles of the stretcher were the
white or coloured turbans that these men affect; while
here and there a sleek black head glistened in the
light.

There was but one house at Chieveley--the
stationmaster's house.  It had been effectually looted
after the Boer fashion, but it would have done well
as a resting-place for the four nurses who came up
with the hospital.  The house, however, had been
taken possession of, and the nurses had to
contemplate either a night in the open or in the
waiting-room at the station.  As this latter room had been
used as a stable by the Boers, it was not in much
request.  It served, however, as a place for the
depositing of personal baggage and for the
preparing of such food as it was possible to
prepare--chiefly, indeed, for the making of tea.

The question of where to sleep was soon solved
by the necessities of the position.  These ill-housed
women, as a matter of fact, were hard at work all
Friday, all Saturday, and all Saturday night.  They
seemed oblivious to fatigue, to hunger, or to any
need for sleep.  Considering that the heat was
intense, that the thirst which attended it was distressing
and incessant, that water was scarce, and that
the work in hand was heavy and trying, it was
wonderful that they came out of it all so little the
worse in the end.

Their ministrations to the wounded were
invaluable and beyond all praise.  They did a service
during those distressful days which none but nurses
could have rendered, and they set to all at Chieveley
an example of unselfishness, self-sacrifice, and
indefatigable devotion to duty.  They brought to many
of the wounded and the dying that comfort which
men are little able to evolve, or are uncouth in
bestowing, and which belongs especially to the tender,
undefined and undefinable ministrations of women.

The English soldier is as sensible of attention
and as appreciative of sympathy and kindness as
any other man who is at the mercy of circumstances,
and I can well believe that there are many
soldiers--some of them now in England, crippled for
life--who will long keep green the memory of the sisters
at Chieveley.

Some weeks after Colenso I was at Pietermaritzburg,
and was looking up in the hospital wards
certain cases which had been attended to in
"No. 4."  Among them was a paralysed man to whom one
of the nurses had been very kind at Chieveley.  I
found him comfortably bestowed, but he was
possessed of a handkerchief the extreme dirtiness of
which led me to suggest that, as he was now in a
centre of luxury, he should ask for a clean one.  To
which he replied, "I am not going to give this one
up; I am afraid of losing it.  The sister who looked
after me at Chieveley gave it to me, and here is her
name in the corner."

As the truce was over on Saturday, and as
the Boers might assume the aggressive and shell
Chieveley and its helpless colony, the order was
given to break up the hospital and get all the wounded
away by train, and to retire with the tents and
equipment to Frere.  This was done on Sunday morning.

As soon as the wounded had left--and it was no
light matter getting them away--it was thought
desirable that the women should be at once got out
of danger, and so they were bundled down to Frere
with little ceremony in a mule wagon.  As they
had no hospital to go to (for "No. 4" did not arrive
until the small hours of the following morning) they
took refuge in the hotel at Frere.  They had some
food with them, albeit it was not of a kind to attract
the fastidious, and the four of them slept on the
floor of a looted and empty room, which even the
kindly heart of Mrs. Wilson could not render other
than a dreary resting place.  This was their only
"night in" in three days.

I had, I am bound to confess, the advantage of
them in the matter of ventilation, for I slept in a
wagon.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SOME TRAITS IN THE MEN`:

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   XI


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   SOME TRAITS IN THE MEN

.. vspace:: 2

As I have already said, the wounded took their
turn of "hard luck" like men.  A few were sullen,
a few relieved their feelings by fluent but
meaningless profanity, in which the Boers were cursed with
as much thoroughness as was the Jackdaw of Rheims.
The majority were silent or said little.  The tendency
of most of the men was to make the least of their
wounds, and some of those who were the worst hit
were the most cheery.  They were, with scarcely an
exception, unselfish, and were singularly patient,
considering that the exercise of patience is not a
marked quality in men.

They ministered to one another's wants with a
tender solicitude which was not marred by the
occasional uncouthness of its method.  There was a
wide-spread belief that tobacco was a panacea for all ills,
and any man who had the wherewithal to smoke
shared the small luxury with his mates.  If there
was only one pipe in a tent it was kept circulating.
One would see a man on one stretcher trying to
arrange a pillow for a comrade on the next: the
pillow in question being commonly made out of a
squashed helmet with a boot inside it.  The man
in any tent who was the least disabled was never so
well pleased as when he was given something to
do for those who were under the same canvas with
him.  With a pannikin and a spoon he would feed
those who could not feed themselves, until they were
glad to be rid of the attention; or he would readjust
a dressing, or cut off a boot, or get the dried blood
from an exposed surface with a never-wearying anxiety.

With few exceptions the men were honestly
anxious "not to give trouble."  It was an article
of faith with them to "take their turn," and no
man would try to make out that his case gave
him a claim for attention over his fellows.  Indeed,
on the occasion of a visit, the occupants of a tent
were eager with one voice to point out what they
considered to be the worst case, and to claim for
it the earliest notice.  The men of a tent were, in
the kindliest way, a little proud of having a "real
bad" case in their midst.  When the curtain of a
tent is up the occupants whose heads are nearest
to the tent ropes can easily converse with those
who are similarly placed in the adjoining tent.  Thus
I heard one man on the ground, whose head was
nearly in the open, call out to another head just in
view on the floor of the next tent: "We've a real
hot 'un in along with us; he's got 'it through the
lungs and the liver both, and the doctor has been
in to him three times."  To which the other head
replied: "That's nothing to a bloke in here.  He's
been off his chump all night; his language has been
a fair treat, and he's had four fits.  We've had a
night, I don't think!"

Another article of faith with the soldier takes the
form of a grim stoicism under pain.  Some of the
wounded endured the examination of their wounds
with Spartan pluck.  They seemed to consider it
above all things essential that they should not cry
out "until they were obliged."  One enormous
Irishman with a shattered thigh yelled out in agony as
he was being lifted upon the operating table to be
examined.  The pain was evidently terrible and
excuse enough for any degree of exclamation.  But
he apologised quaintly and profusely for the noise
he made, urging as an excuse that "he had never
been in a hospital before."  He expressed his regret
much as a man would do who had wandered into a
church with his hat on and who excused himself on
the ground that he had never been in a church
before.

Every patient took a lively interest in his own
case, and especially in the removal of any bullet
which may have lodged in any part of him.  One
ruddy youngster, a Devonshire lad, had had a
shrapnel bullet through his leg, and the bullet could
be felt, on the side opposite to the point of entry,
under the unbroken skin.  He begged that it should
be taken out without chloroform, as he wanted to
see it come out and to keep it and take it home.
He sat up with his back against the tent pole during
the operation, and watched the cutting out of the
lead without a murmur.  No doubt this Boer missile
will find a place in a corner cupboard in some cottage
among the delectable villages of Devon, and will
be for long the wonder and admiration of devoted
women folk.

Among other traits, one notices that the soldier
clings with great pertinacity to his few possessions,
and especially to his boots.  When the haversack
has been lost, and when the tunic has been cut up
to make its removal more easy, or left behind because
it is too blood-stained, there is little remaining in
which the owner may bestow his goods unless it be
in his boots.  There was one poor man I remember
at Spearman's, who was in great distress because,
just as he was being sent down to the base, he had
lost his solitary boot.  He said it contained a puttie,
a tin of jam, two shillings in money, and a bullet
that had been taken out of him.  These are no mean
possessions.

The puttie also is not lightly discarded.  If not
used as a gaiter it is useful for many other purposes,
and especially is it considered well to wind it round
the abdomen as a cholera belt, for the soldier has
great faith in anything in the way of a belt.

When the men were bathing together in hundreds
at Springfield, there was an opportunity of seeing
such variety in the matter of abdominal belts as
could never have been dreamed of.  Some of these
favoured garments were mere shreds and rags, and
were worn probably in order to keep faith with some
good soul at home who had made her boy promise
he would never leave off his belt.  Other binders
were undoubtedly home-made, and the work of
anxious mothers and wives who believed in red
flannel and plenty of it.  Some of the belts were
knitted, and were made to be pulled on, but they
had shrunk so much from repeated wettings, and had
become so infantile in their proportions that the
owner of the garment had to get at least one
comrade to help him pull it over his hips.  When it
was at last in place it quite constricted the body,
and justified the comment of one bather, who
exclaimed to his belted but otherwise naked friend:
"Well, ye've got a waist on ya, if nothink else!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE SIGN OF THE WOODEN CROSS`:

.. class:: center large

   XII


.. class:: center medium

   THE SIGN OF THE WOODEN CROSS

.. vspace:: 2

After Colenso, No. 4 Stationary Field Hospital
returned to the same quarters at Frere, and at Frere
we remained until January 13th, 1900, nearly a month.
The wounded who fell on the unhappy 15th of
December had been satisfactorily disposed of, thanks
to the admirable arrangements made by the Principal
Medical Officer, Colonel Gallwey, C.B.  Not a single
wounded man was left out on the field on the night
of the battle.  On that particular Friday every man
had been attended to before midnight, and on the
following Sunday all the wounded who had fallen
on the 15th were comfortably housed in one or other
of the hospitals at the base.

Our tents, although emptied of the wounded,
soon began to be filled up with cases of sickness,
and especially with cases of dysentery.  Those who
presented the slightest form of the disease could be
sent down to the base, but when the type was severe
the patient did better with as little movement as
possible.  Those, therefore, who remained in our
lines presented a large proportion of examples of
serious illness.

Provisions were ample, medical necessities
abundant, and the ladies of the Colony were infinitely
kind in forwarding to Frere comforts of all sorts.
Our tents were by no means filled, and yet, in
spite of what may be considered favourable
circumstances, there were a good many deaths.

Deaths mean the need for burial, and a little
burying ground was marked off in the rear of the
hospital, close to the railway line.  As weeks went
by the little enclosure needed enlargement, and so
the engineers came and fenced it round afresh with
a wire paling, and gave it a fit aspect of formality.
The names of the dead were indicated on tablets of
wood, and now and then the comrades of a man,
or the survivors of the tent he died in, would erect
over the mound a wooden cross.

These crosses were made usually out of provision
boxes, or perhaps from a whisky case, and many
were very admirably finished and very cleverly carved,
and many were curious of design.  They represented
long hours spent in tedious hacking at a tough slab
of wood with a pocket-knife, and, after that, infinite
patience in the cutting out of the letters of the dead
chum's name.  Finish would be given to the
lettering by means of a tin-opener.

These crosses will be found all over the land of
the war.  Few of them will long survive the wind
and the rain and the blistering sun, and the hand
of the Kaffir who is lacking of fuel.  So long,
however, as they dot the solitary veldt they will be
symbols of the tenderest spirit of good comradeship,
of the kindly heart of men who are supposed to be
little imbued with sentiment, and of that loyal
affection for his friend which is not among the least
of the qualities of the British soldier.

Here and there some elaborate monuments with
some promise of permanency have been erected.
There is one, for example, in which the inscription
is fashioned out of empty cartridge cases stuck into
cement.  There is another carved with some art out
of stone.

I think, however, that those sleep best who lie
beneath the wooden cross fashioned with labour and
some occasional dimness of eye by the pocket-knife
of an old "pal."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE MEN WITH THE SPADES`:

.. class:: center large

   XIII


.. class:: center medium

   THE MEN WITH THE SPADES

.. vspace:: 2

The graves at Frere were dug by our own men,
or rather by a small fatigue party from a regiment
near by.  Nearly every morning they came, the men
with the spades.  There were six of them, with a
corporal, and they came up jauntily, with their
spades on their shoulders and with pipes in their
mouths.  They were in their shirt-sleeves, and there
was much display of belt and of unbuttoned neck.
Their helmets were apt to be stuck on their heads
in informal attitudes.  They were inexpressibly
untidy, and they made in their march a loose, shambling
suggestion of a procession.

They came past my tent about breakfast time,
and every morning I wondered whether the men
with the spades would come, since, when they came,
I knew that a death had taken place in the night,
and wondered who it was.

As in some way symbols of death, as elements
in the last services to be rendered to the dead, the
men with the spades filled me with great curiosity.
They came up cheerily, and when they reached the
outskirts of the hospital the corporal would call out
to any orderly he saw: "Well, nipper, how many
have we got to dig to-day?"

When they had finished they went by my tent
on their way back to camp: still the same untidy,
shambling lot; still, as a rule, smoking, and still
with the appearance of being infectiously cheerful.

I know well enough, however, that there was little
cheeriness among these men with the spades.  They
were dull enough in their inmost hearts.  The soldier
is much impressed by a burying and by the
formalities which surround the dead.  And as he knows
he must not "give way" he is prone to cover his
easily stirred feelings by an attempt at a "devil-may-care"
attitude, and by an assumption of rollicking
indifference.  It is, however, a poorly executed
pretence, and it needed no exceptional acumen to see
that in reality no small shadow of unhappiness
followed the little shuffling procession, in spite of
their pipes and their jauntily posed helmets and their
laboured jokes.

If a soldier's grave is to be dug by sympathising
hands, let it be dug by the hands of these very men
with the spades.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE MARCHING`:

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   XIV


.. class:: center medium

   THE MARCHING

.. vspace:: 2

On Friday, January 12th, Sir Redvers Buller left
Frere, and on the following day we took our second
departure from that place.  The movement was to
be to Springfield, some eighteen miles across the
veldt.  No. 4 Field Hospital was now to leave the
railway and trust to transport by oxen and mules.
The hospital was equipped to accommodate a
minimum of three hundred beds, and was made up of
sixty tents and ten marquees.  The rank and file of
the R.A.M.C. numbered eighty-eight non-commissioned
officers and men; the staff was represented
by three army surgeons, nine civil surgeons, the
two army sisters who had worked at Colenso, and
my remaining nurse, Miss McCaul.  The other nurse,
Miss Tarr, who came out with me, was at Maritzburg,
desperately ill with dysentery.  She nearly lost
her life, and was scarcely convalescent when the
time came for us to return to England.  Her
unexpected recovery was largely due to the skill of
the doctor who looked after her (Dr. Rochfort Brown,
of the Assembly Hospital), and to the extraordinary
kindness of a lady who was waiting at Pietermaritzburg
to join her husband, then locked up with his
regiment in Ladysmith.

The three nurses kept with the hospital, and did
as good work at Spearman's Farm, after Spion Kop
and Vaal Krantz, and at Chieveley, after Pieters,
as they did on the occasion of Colenso.  They had
no easy time, for from the day we began at Frere
until the lull after Ladysmith we pitched the hospital
no less than six times; viz., twice at Frere, twice at
Chieveley, once at Spearman's, and once at Springfield.

Our train was composed of sixteen ox wagons,
each with sixteen oxen, so that the number of oxen
employed was over 260.  There were besides five
ambulances, each drawn by ten mules.  The transport
provided me consisted of a small covered wagon,
a Scotch cart, sixteen mules, a conductor on
horseback, four Kaffir "boys," a groom, and my own
horse and manservant.

On the occasion of our leaving Frere on January
13, we were roused at 3 A.M., while it was yet quite
dark, and while the Southern Cross was still ablaze
in the sky.  All the tents were struck by the ungenial
hour of 4 A.M.  Packing up and the circumstances
of removal were conducted with difficulty and no little
confusion.  The ox teams were lying about, and only
a precarious light was furnished by the lanterns we
carried.  It required no exceptional carelessness to
allow a wanderer in the camp to fall, in the course
of a few minutes, over a prostrate ox, a rolled-up
tent, a pannier, a pile of cooking-pots, or a derelict
saddle.  When the dawn came an agreeable sense
of order was restored, and we started on the march
at 5 A.M.

There was a splendid sunrise, and the day proved
a glorious one, although it was painfully hot.  The
road was a mere track across the veldt, which had
been worn smooth in some places and cut into
ruts in others by the hundreds of wagons and
the great array of guns which had already passed
over it.

"No. 4" formed a long convoy by the time the
last wagon had rumbled out of Frere.  The pace
was very slow, for the ox moves with ponderous
lethargy.  The surgeons rode by the side of the
train, the sergeants and the orderlies walked as they
listed, and the nurses rode in ambulances, to the
great shaking of their bodies.  With us were a
hundred coolies, who were attached to the hospital
for camp work.  They were a dismal crowd as they
stalked along, with their thin, bare legs and their
picturesque tatters of clothing, with all their earthly
possessions in bundles on their heads, and with
apparently a vow of funereal silence in their hearts.

The heat soon became intense, and the march
blank and monotonous.  There was ever the same
shadeless veldt, the same unending brown road,
relieved by nothing but an occasional dead horse or
mule; the same creeping, creaking, wallowing
wagons, the never-absent perspiring Kaffirs, the
everlasting cloud of dust, and over all the blazing sun
that neither hat nor helmet could provide shelter from.

At 7.30 A.M. we reached a spot on the veldt known
as Pretorius' Farm.  It was marked by what was
called, with reckless imagery, a stream, but which
was represented by a wide and squalid gutter filled
with stagnant water which would have done no
discredit to that of the lower Thames.  Here we
outspanned, and here we breakfasted.

These breakfasts under the dome of heaven are
not to be looked back upon with rapture.  Picnicking
is an excellent relaxation in England, but a picnic
without shade, without cooling drinks, without pasties
and salads and jellies and pies, without white
tablecloths and bright knives, without even shelter from
incessant dust, lacks much.  Tinned provisions are,
no doubt, excellent and nourishing, but oh, the
weariness of them!  And oh, the squalor of the single
tin mug, which never loses the taste of what it last
had in it!  And oh, the meanness of the one tin
plate which does duty for every meal, and every
phase of it!  Perhaps of all unappetising adjuncts
to a breakfast the tin of preserved milk, which has
been opened two days and is already becoming
disgustingly familiar, is the most aggressive.  The hot
climate and the indefatigable ant and the fly do
little to make the items of a meal attractive.

What does not rapidly decompose promptly dries
up.  On one occasion a roasted fowl was brought up
reverently to Frere in a tin box, but when it came
to be eaten it had dried into a sort of *papier mâchê*
roast fowl, and was like the viands which are thrown
at the police at pantomimes.  We brought many
varieties of preserved food with us, and of much of
it the question could not fail to arise as to whether
it had ever been worth preserving.

Many had experience, too, of the inventive art
of the shopkeeper, as shown in the evolution of
canteens and pocket table knives.  The canteen, when
unstrapped, tends to fall into a hundred parts, and
can never be put together again.  It is a prominent
or generic feature of most canteens that the kettle
should look as little like a kettle as possible, and
that everything should pack into a frying-pan.  The
pocket picnicking knife contains a knife, a fork, a
spoon, and a corkscrew.  The fork runs into
everything and prevents the knife from being carried in
the pocket.  The spoon and fork are jointed for more
convenient stowing, and at crises in a meal they are
apt to bend weakly in the middle and then to
incontinently shut up.

The outspanning and the inspanning at Pretorius'
Farm occupied over two hours, and then the march
was resumed.  A better country was reached as we
neared the river, and it was a pleasant sight to see
the tumbling stream of the Lesser Tugela, and to
find in one valley the pretence of a garden and a
house among trees.  This was at Springfield, which
place we reached at 2.30 P.M.  The march of some
eighteen miles had therefore been effected in two treks.

At Springfield the camping ground was the least
dreary of any the hospital had experience of, and
the proximity of the Lesser Tugela made bathing
possible.

After a few days at Springfield we moved on to
Spearman's Farm, where we camped by the hill
called Mount Alice.

The return from Spearman's after Spion Kop and
Vaal Krantz was even more monotonous than the
going forth.  The first journey was to Springfield,
which was reached at sundown, and where we
bivouacked for the night.  Springfield was left at
dawn, and the next night was spent in a bivouac
at Frere.  On the following day, before the sun was
well up, we took the last stage of the march and
reached Chieveley.  Here all enjoyed once more the
luxury of having tents overhead, for during the
crawling journey over the veldt we slept in wagons, on
wagons, or under wagons.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SPEARMAN'S FARM`:

.. class:: center large

   XV


.. class:: center medium

   SPEARMAN'S FARM

.. vspace:: 2

In a lonely valley under the mimosa-covered heights
which dominate the Great Tugela is the lonely
homestead of Spearman's Farm.  Those who built it and
made a home in it could have had little thought
that it would one day figure in the annals of history.
The farmhouse and the farm buildings and the garden
were enclosed by a rough stone wall, and upon this
solitary homestead the hand of the Boer had fallen
heavily.  The house had been looted, and what was
breakable in it had been broken.  The garden had
been trampled out of recognition, the gates were
gone, the agricultural implements had been wantonly
destroyed, and the unpretending road which led to
the farm was marked by the wheels of heavy guns.
The house was small and of one story, and was
possessed of the unblushing ugliness which
corrugated iron alone can provide.  The door swung open,
and any could enter who would, and through the
broken windows there was nothing to be seen but
indiscriminate wreckage.  There was about the little
house and its cluster of outbuildings a suggestion
of the Old Country, and it wanted but a rick or so,
and a pond with white ducks to complete a picture
of a small English farm.  The garden had evidently
been the subject of solicitous care, and was on that
account all the more desolate, and what delight it
ever had had been trampled out of it by countless
hoofs or obliterated by the rattling passage over it
of a battery or so of artillery.

At the back of the farm, and at the foot of a
green kopje, was a quaint little burial ground--little
because it held but two graves, and quaint because
these were surmounted by unexpected stone memorials
of a type to be associated with a suburban English
cemetery.  These monuments were fitly carved, and
were distinctly the product of no mean town, and
they were to the memory respectively of George
Spearman and of Susan Spearman.  For some
undefinable reason these finished memorials, so formal
and so hackneyed in their design, appeared inappropriate
and even unworthy of the dignity of the lonely
graves at the foot of the kopje.  Some more rugged
emblem, free from artificiality and from any
suggestion of the crowded haunts of men, would have
covered more fittingly the last resting-place of these
two pioneers.  A few trees, almost the only trees
within sight, shaded the little graveyard, and the
trees and the monuments were enclosed by a very
solid iron railing.  It was in the shadow of this
oasis that the dead from our hospital were buried.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE HOSPITAL AT SPEARMAN'S`:

.. class:: center large

   XVI


.. class:: center medium

   THE HOSPITAL AT SPEARMAN'S

.. vspace:: 2

The hospital reached Spearman's on January 16th,
and was pitched at the foot of the hill, upon the
summit of which the naval gun was firing.  We
were, therefore, close to those scenes of fighting
which were to occupy the next few weeks, and too
close for comfort to the great 4.7 gun, the repeated
booming of which often became a trouble to those
who were lying ill in the hospital.

The heights that dominated the southern bank
of the Tugela were very steep on the side that faced
the river, but on the side that looked towards
Spearman's the ground sloped gradually down into a wide
plain which, like other stretches of veldt, was dotted
with kopjes and slashed with dongas.  Anyone who
mounted the hill at the back of the hospital would
come by easy steps to an abrupt ridge, beyond which
opened a boundless panorama.

In the valley below this crest was the winding
Tugela, and just across the dip rose the solemn ridge
of Spion Kop.  Far away in the distance were the
purple hills which overshadowed Ladysmith.  If the
crest were followed to the right the ground rose until
at last the summit of the naval hill was reached,
and here were the "handy men" and their big gun.
From this high eminence a splendid view was
obtained of the country we desired once more to
possess.  The Tugela glistened in the sun like a
band of silver, and over the plain and in and out
among the kopjes and round the dongas the brown
road wound to Ladysmith.  The road was deserted,
and the few homesteads which came into view showed
no signs of life.  At the foot of the hill was Potgieter's
Drift, while above the ford was a splashing rapid,
and below was the pont which our men had seized
with such daring.

The face of the hill towards the river was covered
with mimosa trees and with cactus bushes and aloes,
and this unexpected wealth of green almost hid the
red and grey boulders which clung to the hill-side.
Among the rocks were many strange flowers, many
unfamiliar plants, and creeping things innumerable.
This was a favourite haunt of the chameleon, and
I believe it was here that the hospital chameleon
was captured.

The quiet of the place, when the guns had ceased,
was absolute, and was only broken by the murmur
of the numerous doves which occupied the mimosa
woods.  The whole place seemed a paradise of peace,
and there was nothing to suggest that there were
some thousands of grimy men beyond the river who
were busy with the implements of death.  On looking
closely one could see brown lines along many of the
hillsides, and these said lines were trenches, and
before the hubbub began men in their shirt-sleeves
could be seen working about them with pickaxes and
shovels.

I should imagine that few modern battles have
been viewed by the casual onlooker at such near
proximity and with such completeness in detail as
were the engagements of Spion Kop and Vaal
Krantz, when viewed from the high ground above
our hospital.

The hospital, though now more than twenty-five
miles from the railway, was very well supplied with
almost every necessity and with the amplest stores
of food.  Bread was not to be obtained, or only on
occasion, when it would be brought up by an
ambulance on its return from Frere.  We had with
us, however, our flocks and herds, and were thus
able to supply the sick and wounded with fresh milk,
and the whole hospital with occasional fresh meat.
We were a little short of water, and fuel was not
over abundant.  As a result the washing of clothes,
towels and sheets presented the same type of problem
as is furnished by the making of bricks without
straw.  The aspect of a flannel shirt that has been
washed by a Kaffir on the remote veldt leaves on
the mind the impression that the labour of the man
has been in vain.

Our stay at Spearman's was extended to three
weeks, and we dealt with over a thousand wounded
during that period, and I am sure that all those who
came within our lines would acknowledge that at
"No. 4" they found an unexpected degree of comfort
and were in every way well "done for."

On the Sunday after our arrival the wounded
began to come in.  Thirteen only came from the
division posted at Potgieter's Drift, the rest came
from Sir Charles Warren's column.  Increasing
numbers of wounded came in every day in batches
of from fifty to one hundred and fifty.  They were
all attended to, and were sent on to Frere as soon
as possible.  All the serious cases, however, were
kept in the hospital.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE TWO WHITE LIGHTS`:

.. class:: center large

   XVII


.. class:: center medium

   THE TWO WHITE LIGHTS

.. vspace:: 2

Many of the wounded who were brought in between
the 18th and the 24th of January came in after
sundown.  The largest number arrived on the night of
Monday, the 22nd.  It was a very dark night.  The
outline of the tents and marquees was shadowy and
faint.  The camp was but the ghost of a camp.
Here and there a feeble light would be shining
through the fly of a marquee, and here and there
an orderly, picking his way among the tent ropes
by the aid of a lantern, would light up a row or
two in the little canvas town.  In the front of the
camp was the flagstaff, high up upon which were
suspended the two white lights which marked the
situation of the hospital.  These lamps only sufficed
to illumine a few of the tents in the first line.  The
flaps of these tents were probably secured and the occupants asleep.

It was a weary journey to the hospital, and one
can imagine with what eagerness the tired, hungry,
aching wounded would look ahead for the two white
lights.  Rocking in pain on a crawling ox wagon,
or jolted in the rigid fabric of an ambulance, the
way must have seemed unending.  Tumbling along
in the dark, with no sound but the creaking of the
wagon and the incessant moans of the shapeless,
huddled figures who were lying in the cart, the
journey might well have been one never to be
forgotten.  How many a time a tired head must have
been lifted up from the straw to see if there were
yet any sign of the two white lights.  Would the
journey never end, and the pain never cease? and
was the broken limb to be wrenched every time the
blundering wagon pitched and rolled?  And why
had the man who had talked so much ceased to
speak--and indeed to breathe?  Would they drive
through the dark for eternity? and would they never
come in view of the two white lights?

It was a miserable sight to see these belated
wagons come in, and they would often rumble in
all night.  They emerged one by one out of the
darkness and drew up in the open space between the
two central lines of tents, and between the few
uplifted lanterns held by the sergeants and the men
on duty.  After they had deposited their load they
moved away and vanished again into the night.

Some of the wounded in the wagons were sitting
up, but the majority were lying on the straw with
which the wagon would be littered.  Some were
asleep and some were dead; and by the light of the
lanterns the wagon seemed full of khaki-coloured
bundles, vague in outline and much stained with
blood, with here and there an upraised bandage, and
here and there a wandering hand, or a leg in crude
splints, or a bare knee.  And round about all a
medley of rifles, boots, haversacks, helmets, cartridge
pouches and tin canteens.

What the journey must have been to many I
could gather from an incident of one of these dreary
nights.  A wagon had reached the hospital lines
and was waiting to be unloaded.  A man with a
shattered arm in a sling was sitting up, and at his
feet a comrade was lying who had been very hard
hit, and who had evidently become weaker and less
conscious as the wagon had rolled along.  The
apparently sleeping man moved, and, lifting his
head to look at his pal, who was sitting above him,
asked wearily, for probably the fiftieth time, "Don't
you see nothing yet, Bill, of the two white lights?"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`AFTER SPION KOP`:

.. class:: center large

   XVIII


.. class:: center medium

   AFTER SPION KOP

.. vspace:: 2

On Wednesday, January 24th, came the terrible affair
of Spion Kop.  On the previous day some hint of
what was expected was foreshadowed in the order
that an additional hundred bell tents were to be
erected in No. 4 Field Hospital.  These tents were
obtained from a brigade who were bivouacking, and
were all pitched by Wednesday afternoon.  They
represented accommodation for an additional number
of five hundred wounded, and it was, therefore,
evident that an important engagement was at hand.

On Thursday the wounded came pouring in, and
they came in the whole day and until late at night,
until the hospital was full.  The number admitted
on that day was nearly six hundred.  Those who
were deposited in the bell tents had to lie on
stretchers.  All were provided with blankets.  In
spite of the immense number of the wounded, they
were all got under shelter by Thursday night, and
had had their more serious injuries attended to, and
were made as comfortable as circumstances would
admit.  Some of the staff went round with water and
food, and others with morphia, while a third party
made it their business to see that every man was
bestowed as comfortably as extemporised pillows or
change of posture could make him.  The pillows
were represented by helmets, or by the happy
combination of helmet and boot, or by haversacks or
rolled-up tunics.

The volunteer ambulance corps and the coolie
bearers did excellent service.  The larger number of
the wounded were on the top of Spion Kop.  The
path down was about two miles, was steep, and in
places very difficult.  The carriage of the wounded
down the hill had all to be by hand.  From the
foot of the hill to the hospital the carriage was by
ambulance wagons and in some cases by bearers.
All the stretchers had hoods.  There was no doubt
that the wounded suffered much on account of the
tedious transport, but it was rendered as little
distressing as possible.

The surgeons who went after the wounded on the
top of the hill told us that the sight of the dead
and injured was terrible in the extreme, the wounds
having been mostly from shell and shrapnel; some
men had been blown almost to pieces.  The weather
on Wednesday was warm, but was not to be
compared with the intense heat on the day of the battle
of Colenso.  The temperature was that of a hot
summer's day in England.  Thursday was fortunately
cloudy and much cooler.

As to the wounded, there was the usual proportion
of minor injuries, but on the whole the wounds
were much more severe than those received at Colenso.
This is explained by the large number of wounds
from shell and shrapnel.  The men, however, were
much exhausted by the hardships they had
undergone.  In many instances they had not had their
clothes off for a week or ten days.  They had slept
in the open without great-coats, and had been reduced
to the minimum in the matter of rations.  The nights
were cold, and there was on nearly every night a
heavy dew.  Fortunately there was little or no rain.
The want of sleep and the long waiting upon the
hill had told upon them severely.  There is no doubt
also that the incessant shell fire must have proved
a terrible strain.  Some of the men, although
wounded, were found asleep upon their stretchers
when brought in.  Many were absolutely exhausted
and worn out independently of their wounds.

In spite of all their hardships the wounded men
behaved splendidly, as they always have done.  They
never complained.  They were quite touching in their
unselfishness and in their anxiety "not to give
trouble"; but it was evident enough that they were
much depressed at the reverse.

The shell wounds were the most terrible and the
most difficult to treat.  One man had most of his
face shot away, including both eyes.  Another had
the forearm shot off and two fearful wounds of each
thigh dividing the anterior muscles to the bone.  In
one case a shrapnel had opened a main artery in
the forearm, and the man came down safely with a
tourniquet on his brachial artery composed of a plug
of cake tobacco and the tape of a puttie.  I cannot
help thinking that this ingenious tourniquet was the
work of one of the "handy men."





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.. _`THE STORY OF THE RESTLESS MAN`:

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   XIX


.. class:: center medium

   THE STORY OF THE RESTLESS MAN

.. vspace:: 2

The following incident may serve to illustrate the
often-expressed unselfishness of the soldier, and his
anxiety to do what he can for a comrade in trouble.

Among the wounded who came down from Spion
Kop was a private, a native of Lancashire, who had
been shot in the thigh.  The thigh-bone was broken,
and the fracture had been much disturbed by the
journey to the hospital.  The man was given a
bedstead in one of the marquees; the limb was adjusted
temporarily, and he was told to keep very quiet and
not to move off his back.  Next morning, however,
he was found lying upon his face, with his limb out
of position and his splints, as he himself confessed,
"all anyhow."  He was remonstrated with, but
excused himself by saying, "But you see, doctor, I
am such a restless man."

The limb was more elaborately adjusted, and
everything was left in excellent position.  Next
morning, however, the restless man was found lying on
the floor of the marquee, and in his bed was a man
who had been shot through the chest.  The marquee
was crowded and the number of beds were few, and
those who could not be accommodated on beds had
to lie on stretchers on the ground.  The man who was
shot in the chest had come in in the night, and
had been placed on the only available stretcher.  The
restless man proceeded to explain that the
newcomer seemed worse off than he was, and that he
thought the man would be easier on the bed, so he
had induced the orderlies to effect the change.  The
man who was shot in the chest died suddenly, and
in due course the restless man was back in his own
bed once more.

It was not, however, for long, for on another
morning visit the Lancashire lad was found on the
floor again, and again beamed forth an explanation
that one of the wounded on the ground, who had
come in late, seemed to be very bad, and so he had
changed over.  The present occupant of the bed was
in a few days moved down to the base, and the
restless man was in his own bed again.  But not
many days elapsed before he discovered among the
fresh arrivals an old chum, who longed to lie on
a bed, and thus the good-hearted North-countryman
found himself once more on the floor.

The moving of a man with a broken thigh from
a bed to the ground and back again means not only
such disordering of splints and bandages, but much
pain to the patient and no little danger to the damaged
limb.  So this generous lad was talked to seriously,
and with a faintly veiled sternness was forbidden to
give up his bed again on any pretence.  In the little
attempt he made to excuse himself he returned once
more to his original joke and said, with a broad
grin: "But you see, doctor, I am such a restless man."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`"DID WE WIN?"`:

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   XX


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   "DID WE WIN?"

.. vspace:: 2

One instance of the indomitable pluck of the British
soldier deserves special notice.  A private in the
King's Royal Rifles, of the name of Goodman, was
brought from Spion Kop to No. 4 Field Hospital
in an ambulance with many others.  He was in a
lamentable plight when he arrived.  He had been
lying on the hill all night.  He had not had his
clothes off for six days.  Rations had been scanty,
and he had been sleeping in the open since he left
the camp.  He had been struck in the face by a
fragment of shell, which had carried away his right
eye, the right upper jaw, the corresponding part of
the cheek and mouth, and had left a hideous cavity,
at the bottom of which his tongue was exposed.  The
rest of his face was streaked with blood, which was
now dried and black--so black that it looked as if
tar had been poured on his head and had streamed
down his cheek and neck.  Eight hours had been
occupied on the journey to the hospital, and eight
hours is considered to be long even for a railway
journey in a Pullman car.

He was unable to speak, and as soon as he was
settled in a tent he made signs that he wanted to
write.  A little memorandum book and a pencil
were handed to him, and it was supposed that his
inquiry would be as to whether he would die--what
chance he had?  Could he have something to drink?
Could anything be done for his pain?  After going
through the form of wetting his pencil at what had
once been a mouth, he simply wrote: "Did we
win?"  No one had the heart to tell him the truth.

His memorandum-book--which is in my
possession--was used by him while he remained
speechless in the hospital, and certain of the notes he
made in it, and which are here appended, speak for
themselves:

"Water."

"I haven't done bleeding yet."

"I've got it this time.  I think my right eye is
gone, and I can hardly swallow."

"There are no teeth in front."

"It aches a lot."

"I'm lying the wrong way for my wound."

"I found the trenches."

"I've had all the officers over to see me."

"He is pleased, the doctor."

"Did my haversack come with me?  If it did,
there is some tobacco in it.  You can give it to
them that smoke."

Poor Goodman, he had no mouth to smoke with
himself.  I am glad to say he reached England,
is in good health, and is as cheery as ever.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE FIGHTING SPIRIT`:

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   XXI


.. class:: center medium

   THE FIGHTING SPIRIT

.. vspace:: 2

The circumstances under which men enlist in the
Army are, no doubt, varied enough.  But not a
few find their place under the colours in obedience
to that fighting spirit which has for centuries been
strong in the hearts of the islanders from Great
Britain and Ireland.  That spirit has anyhow carried
the colours over the world.

Among the wounded there are many who, to
use an expression common on the soldiers' lips,
"were fed up with the war": they had had enough
of it.  There were others who were eager to be at
it again, who felt that they had a score to wipe off;
and even among the desperately hurt there would
be here and there a man keen for revenge, and full
of a passionate desire "to have another go at
'em."  These men, ill as they often were, would describe
with a savage delight, and in savage language, the
part they had played in the battle out of which they
had been finally dragged on a stretcher.  A little
success, a victory however small, did much to lessen
the torment of a wound and to gild the contemplation
of a life henceforth to be spent as a cripple.
One gallant lad had been paralysed by a Mauser
at short range, and had little prospect of other than
permanent lameness.  He had been in the assault
on Vaal Krantz, had escaped without hurt until just
towards the end, and was shot as his victorious
company were rushing the last trench.  After he
had been examined, and while he was still lying
on his stretcher, I could not avoid the remark,
"This is a bad business."  To which he replied,
"Yes, but we took the bally trench."

To many and many of the dying the last sound
of which they were conscious must have belonged
to the clamour of war, and it was well for those
who heard, or fancied they heard, above the roar of
guns the shout of victory.  One officer, dying in
the hospital at Spearman's, had his last moments
made happy by the sound of battle.  He had sunk
into a state of drowsiness, and was becoming
gradually unconscious.  Every now and then the
boom of the 4.7 gun, firing from the hill above us,
would rattle through the tents, and with each shot
a smile would come over his face, and he would
mutter with great satisfaction, "They are getting it
now."  He repeated these words many times, and
they were, indeed, the last he uttered.  Things were
evidently going better with the army in his dream
than they were at that moment with the real regiments
by the river.

Some most vivid suggestions of what may pass
through the soldier's mind during the actual
circumstances of war were afforded by the utterances
of more or less unconscious men when passing
under the influence of chloroform in the operation-tent.
Before they fell into the state of sleep, it was
evident that the drug, with its subtle intoxicating
power, brought back to the fading sense some flash
of a scene which may have been real, but which was
rendered lurid, spectral, and terrifying by the action
of the poison.  Under this condition incoherent words
of command would be uttered in rapid tones, full
of an agony of eagerness and haste; and cries for
help would be yelled forth in what seemed to be a
maniacal frenzy.  Many of the actual utterances that
escaped these unconscious lips, and gave glimpses
of a phantom war as seen through the vapor of
chloroform, were too fragmentary to be remembered,
but two at least were muttered with such an emphasis
of horror that I took note of them.

One of the wounded from Spion Kop had
evidently engraved upon his mind the hideous scene
of slaughter which the trenches on that hill
presented.  As he was being anæsthetised it was
apparent that in his dream he was back again in
the trenches, and was once more among his dead
and mangled comrades.  The vision of one wounded
man especially haunted him and fascinated him, and
at last he screamed out: "There goes that bloke
again whose leg was shot away; blimy, if he ain't
crawling now!"

Another poor fellow had before his eye the spectre
of an awful kopje.  His fragmentary utterances
made vivid the unearthly land he was traversing.
All who stood by could picture the ghostly kopje,
and could almost share in his anguish when he
yelled: "There they are on the hill!  For God's
sake, shoot!  Why don't we shoot?"





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.. _`THE BODY-SNATCHERS`:

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   XXII


.. class:: center medium

   THE BODY-SNATCHERS

.. vspace:: 2

Early in the campaign Colonel Gallwey, the
P.M.O., organised a volunteer ambulance corps.
Two thousand bearers were wanted, and in a few
days two thousand were enrolled.  Their duties were
to carry the wounded off the field, to transport
serious cases from the advanced hospitals or
dressing stations to the stationary field hospital, and
thence, if need be, to the railway.  There were to
be twelve on a stretcher.

This corps contained examples of all sorts and
conditions of men--labourers, mechanics, "gentlemen,"
dock loafers, seamen, dentists, a chemist or
two, a lawyer or two, tram drivers, clerks, miners,
and shop assistants.  Many were refugees from the
Transvaal, and the majority had been thrown out
of work of some kind or another by the war.  A
chance of getting employment had, no doubt,
induced many to enlist, while probably the greater
number were attracted by a spirit of adventure, by
a desire to get to the front and to see something
of the pomp and circumstance of war.

They formed a strange company when they
mustered at Pietermaritzburg--a section of a street
crowd in their everyday clothes, or in such clothes
as were selected for roughing it.  There was immense
variety in the matter of hats.  Belts were a feature.
The flannel shirt, which was practically *de rigueur*,
was replaced in an instance or two by a jersey.
Collars were not worn; neckties were optional.  There
was no fixed fashion in the matter of boots; they
varied from canvas shoes, worthy of a dandy at the
seaside, to top boots fit for a buccaneer.

As to the men themselves, they were of all ages,
heights, shapes, and sizes--the men of a crowd.
Some were sunburned, and some were pale.  Some
were indifferent, but most were eager.  Some were
disposed to assume a serious military bearing, while
others appeared to regard the venture as a silly joke
of which they were beginning to be a little ashamed.

There is no doubt that the corps was in
appearance not impressive.  They were wild and shabby
looking, disordered, unsymmetrical, and bizarre.
They were scoffed at; and acquired the not unkindly
meant title of the "body-snatchers."  Later on the
exuberant invention of the soldier dignified them
by the titles of the "catch-'em-alive-oh's" or the
"pick-me-ups."

It is needless to say that a good number of
unsuitable and undesirable men had found their way
into the ranks.  These were gradually weeded out,
and under the discreet command of Major Wright
the corps improved day by day, until the time
Spearman's was reached they formed a very efficient,
reliable, and handy body of men.  They did splendid
service, and one which was keenly appreciated.
They were the means of saving many lives and an
infinite amount of pain.  Their longest tramp, of
which I had knowledge, was from Spearman's to
Frere, a distance of twenty-five miles.  They showed
the usual British indifference under fire, and went
without hesitancy wherever they were led.
Unfortunately it happened that many of the worthy
"body-snatchers" were wounded, and not a few of them
were killed.

In the early days of their career the "catch-'em-alive-oh's"
fell upon bad times.  They knew little
of camp life, and less of the art of getting the most
out of it.  They had no organisation among
themselves, and many were incompetent to shift alone.
They began as a mob, and they tried to live as a
mob, and the result was that about the time of
Colenso they had little comfort but that which is
said by the moralist to be derived from labour.  In
their camp after the battle they had time to settle
down.  They entered the camp a thriftless crowd,
and came out of it a company of handy men.

They were popular with the soldiers.  They had
the gift of tongues of a kind, and could compete
with most in the matter of lurid language.  Their
incessant hunger and indiscriminate thirst were a
matter for admiration.  They were good-hearted,
and, although they looked wild, they meant well.
Many a wounded man has been rocked to sleep
on their stretchers, and on more than one dying
ear the last sound that fell was the tramp of their
untidy feet.





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.. _`SEEING THEM OFF`:

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   XXIII


.. class:: center medium

   SEEING THEM OFF

.. vspace:: 2

On the afternoon of Thursday, February 8th, the
news came to the hospital at Spearman's that the
army was once more to retire, and signs were already
abroad to show that the retreat had commenced.
At the same time an order arrived to the effect that
all the wounded were to be moved at sunrise on the
following day to Frere.  Our stay at
Spearman's--extended now to three weeks--had therefore come
to an end.

Among those left in the hospital were 150 patients
whose condition was more or less serious.  They
had been kept under care as long as possible in
order to avoid or postpone the danger of the long
journey to the base.  It was determined that these
150 men should be carried down to Frere on
stretchers and by hand.  And this was done, and
well done, by the much-ridiculed corps of
"body-snatchers."

It was no light undertaking, for the distance was
twenty-five miles, and the road was dusty and not
of the best.  Every step had to be tramped under
a glaring sun, and the heat of that day was great.
Allowing twelve men to a stretcher, 1,800 men would
be required.  This number was forthcoming at
sunrise, and they accomplished the march in the
day, reaching Frere at sundown.  This was a splendid
piece of work.

It is not hard to surmise what would have
happened to many of those who were the most ill if
their journey to Frere had been by the ox-wagon,
or by the still less easy ambulance.  As it was, the
whole convoy went down with comfort, and only
one man died on the way, and he had indeed just
reached his journey's end when his life ebbed away.

Long before sunrise on the morning of the departure
from Spearman's the hospital was astir; and
while it was yet dark lights could be seen in most
of the tents, and lanterns carried by orderlies or
coolies were moving here and there among the grey
lines.  The two white lights which hung from the
flag-pole in front of the hospital were still shining.
By the time the shadows had vanished and the light
of the dawn fell upon "No. 4," it was in a state of
untidy turmoil.  Everyone was on the alert to "see
them off."

In the marquees the last dressings were being
carried out by candle-light.  Clothes were being
got together; helpless men were being dressed;
blankets were being rolled up, and such comforts
as the hospital could provide were being packed
for the wounded to take with them on their journey.
Cherished possessions were being dragged out from
under pillows, to be safely disposed in a haversack
or a boot.  The grey light fell upon orderlies in
their shirt sleeves bustling from tent to tent; upon
piles of provision cases and of forage which were
being turned out; upon heaps of stretchers; upon
the rolled-up kit of the Army Medical Corps men;
upon melancholy coolies who had been up all night,
and were still crawling about, and were still in their
night attire.  This night outfit would consist,
probably, of a turban, a mealie sack round the neck,
and a decayed army mackintosh on the body; or
of a turban, a frock-coat, which might at one time
have graced Bond Street, and bare legs.  Here and
there in the indistinct light would be seen the white
apron and trim dress of a nurse, who still carried
the lantern she had had with her since the small
hours of the morning.  All were anxious to be up
in time to "see them off."

In due course, and even yet before the sun could
be seen, the Volunteer Ambulance Corps began to
form up outside the camp.  They were nearly two
thousand strong, and they were a wild-looking
company.  There was, however, more uniformity in
their clothing now, because they had been supplied
with khaki tunics, and with occasional khaki trousers.
Some wore putties, some gaiters, and some had
tucked their trousers inside their socks.  A few
had cut their trousers off about the knee and were
distinguished by bare legs.  A gaiter on one leg
and a puttie on the other was not considered to
be in any way *démodé*.  Their hats were still very
varied, but many had possessed themselves of
helmets which had been picked up on the field.
Uniformity and smartness could, however, not be
expected if one man wore a helmet and the next
a tam-o'-shanter, the third a bowler hat, and the
fourth a "squasher" or a headpiece of his own
designing.  They had red-cross brassards on their
left arms, but these had become merely fluttering
bits of colouring.

This weird corps carried their possessions with
them, and it was evident that in transporting their
impedimenta they had appreciated the value of the
division of labour.  Many had military water-bottles,
which they had probably picked up.  Others carried
their water in glass bottles, which dangled from their
waists.  Hanging about their bodies by strings or
straps would be various useful domestic articles.
Attached to one man would be a bundle of firewood,
to another a saucepan, to a third a kettle and
a lantern.  Here a man would have in the place of
a sabre-tache a biscuit tin suspended by a cord, or
a hatchet and a tin-opener, or a spare pair of boots,
which swung bravely as he marched.  A popular
*vade mecum* was an empty jam tin (much blackened
by the smoke of the camp fire) with a wire handle,
and evidence that it represented a cooking-pot.
Belts, knives, sticks, overcoats, rolled-up
mackintoshes, and a general tint of sunburn and dirt
completed the uniform of this strange company.

Before they entered the camp the wounded had
been brought out on stretchers.  The stretchers
were placed on the grass, side by side, in long rows
which extended across the breadth of the hospital.
The men lying on them were not pleasant to look
at.  They formed a melancholy array of "bad
cases."  Each man was covered by a brown blanket, and
within the hood of the stretcher were his special
belongings, his boots and his haversack, and, with
them, such delicacies for the journey as a pot of
jam, a chunk of bread, some biscuits, a lump of
tinned meat in a newspaper, and bottles (mostly
with paper corks) containing water or milk or tea.
Those on the stretchers presented bandaged legs
and bandaged arms, splints of all kinds, covered-up
eyes and bound-up heads, and the general
paraphernalia of an accident ward.  Some of the faces
were very pinched and pale, for pain and loss of
blood and exhaustion had caused the sunburn to
fade away.

The light of the dawn fell upon this woe-begone
line, and dazzled the eyes of many with the
unaccustomed glare.  Those who were not too ill were in
excellent spirits, for this was the first step on the
journey homewards.  Such were excited, garrulous
and jocular, and busy with pipes and tobacco.  A
few were already weary, and had on their lips the
oft-repeated expression that "they were fed up with
the war."  Many a head was lifted out of the hood
to see if any old chum could be recognised along the
line, and from those would come such exclamations
as: "Why are you here, Tom?" "Where have
you been hit?" "Ain't this a real beanfeast?"
"Thought you were stiff." "We're on the blooming
move at last."

Many of the men on the stretchers were delirious,
and some were almost unmanageable.  One poor
fellow was babbling about the harvest and the time
they were having.  He was evidently in his dream
once more among the cornfields of England, and
among plenteous beer.  Another shook the canvas
hood of his stretcher and declared with vehemence
that he "would not go in any bally sailing boat,
he was going in a steamer, and the colonel would
never let his men go in a rotten sailing
ship."  Whereupon he affirmed that "he was going to chuck
it," and proceeded to effect his purpose by rolling
off his stretcher.

When the Volunteer Ambulance Corps marched
along the line of stretchers they were the subject of
much chaff, and many comments such as these burst
forth: "You're being paraded before the General.
So buck up!" "Pull up yer socks."  "You with
the kettle!  Do you take yourself for a gipsy van?"
"We ain't buying no hardware to-day--go home."
"You know there's a Government handicap on this
job, and half a crown to the man who gets in first,
so you had better hurry my stretcher along."  And
so on; in the dialect of London, of Dublin, of
Lancashire, and of Devon, with infinite variety and with
apparent good spirits.

There were many anxious cases among this
crowd on the stretchers.  One, for example, was
an Irishman named Kelly, a private in the Lancashire
Fusiliers.  He was as plucky a soldier as the
plucky soil of Ireland has ever produced.  His right
arm had been smashed on Spion Kop.  He had
been on the hill two nights; and when the darkness
fell had spent his time in crawling about on the
ground, holding the sleeve of his shattered arm
between his teeth, dragging his rifle with his left
hand, and searching the bodies of the dead for any
water that may have been left in their water-bottles.
He had lost an incredible amount of blood, and
when he reached the hospital it was necessary to
amputate the whole upper limb, including the
shoulder-blade and the collar-bone.  He went
through this ordeal with infinite courage and with
irrepressible good humour.  He had been the strong
man of his regiment and a great boxer, and, as he
casually said, "He should miss his arm."

Kelly's spirits were never damped, and he joked
on all topics whenever he had the strength to joke.
He was a little difficult to manage, but was as
docile as a lamb in the hands of the Sister who
looked after him, and for whom he had a deep
veneration.  Nothing in the ordinary way upset
this gallant Irishman, but just before the convoy
started he did for once break down.  Two bottles
of English beer had found their way into the camp
as a precious gift.  Kelly was promised these
bottles to take with him on his journey.  In due
course they were deposited in the hood of his
stretcher.  When his eyes fell upon the delectable
vision of English beer he could stand no more, and
Kelly wept.

I little thought when I saw Kelly off at Spearman's
that the next time I should say good-bye to
him would be in a hansom cab in Pall Mall; but
so it was.

When all was ready the stretchers were lifted
off the ground in order, and the bearers filed out
of the camp and on to the dusty track.  The
morning was like that of a summer's day in England,
and we watched the long convoy creep along the
road until it was nearly out of sight.  The perfect
quiet of their departure was only broken by the
oft-repeated boom of the naval gun on the hill.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A FUNERAL AT SPEARMAN'S`:

.. class:: center large

   XXIV


.. class:: center medium

   A FUNERAL AT SPEARMAN'S

.. vspace:: 2

There were many deaths at Spearman's, and the
burying ground was under the shadow of the clump
of trees which stood at the back of Spearman's Farm,
and of which burying place I have already spoken.
Those who died were carried away to the
mortuary-tent, and there each body was sewn up by the
coolies in the brown army blanket or in a sheet.
The sewing was after the manner of the sewing up
of a package.  The brown blanket, however, formed
but a poor covering at the last, and it made little
mystery of what it shrouded.  Beneath its tightly
drawn folds there was shadowed something that was
still a man, for was there not the clear outline of
head and chin and shoulders and feet?  When the
body was ready it was brought out of the tent,
placed upon a stretcher, and carried to the grave.
Over the bodies of the officers was thrown the
Union Jack, but the bodies of the soldiers were
covered only by the brown blanket or the sheet.

There was one funeral which I have in mind,
on the occasion of which eight were buried--eight
who had been struck down on Spion Kop--four
non-commissioned officers and four men.

The funeral party drew up near to the
mortuary-tent, and halted there in precise military
formation.  There was the firing party, who went
first, with inverted rifles; then came the bearers,
and then a small company from the regiments of
the dead.

Some little way off stood a cluster of men who
had come, in a shy, apologetic sort of way, to see
the last of their pals.  They seemed to think that
their presence near by the formal procession was
an intrusion, and they huddled together, some ten
of them, at a distance.  From their attitudes one
inferred that they did not wish to be considered
as taking part in the funeral.  They were
pretending to be merely onlookers.  They were restless,
and disposed to shuffle their feet, or they kicked the
earth up absently with the toes of their boots.

Some of the ten kept their eyes fixed upon the
mortuary-tent, to watch the bodies come out.  As
each of the blanket-covered objects was brought
from the tent into the sunlight there were murmured
comments from this small knot of untidy men--these
men who did not want to look like mourners,
but who were mourners indeed.  "That's surely
Ginger," says one of the number, pointing to the
body last brought out.  "No, that ain't Ginger,"
says his companion.  "Ginger never had a chest on
him like that.  That's more like Jimmy Evans.
Jimmy held hisself like that often."

So they talked, and they kept up fairly well this
pretence at a casual conversation.  But some could
not trust themselves to speak, and these kept their
backs to the tent and kicked at the earth absently.
Those who took part in the apparent nonchalant
talk had a struggle, I think, to keep their voices
from breaking and their eyes from becoming dim.
The "things" they were bringing out of the tent,
done up in blankets, had once been men who had,
perhaps, enlisted with them, who probably hailed
from the same town in the Old Country, and who
were the subjects of many memories.

When all the bodies were ready and the stretchers
in line, the procession started, and marched slowly
and silently round the kopje and along the glade
that led to the trees by Spearman's Farm.

But for the tents of a far-off camp the veldt was
a desert.  There was scarcely a human being in
sight.  There was none of the pomp of a soldier's
burial; no funeral march; no awed crowd; no tolling
of bells; no group of weeping women in black
clothes; no coffin borne on a gun-carriage and
distinguished by the helmet and accoutrements of the
dead.  There were only the eight bundles in the
brown blankets on the eight stretchers.  And some
little way in the rear were the slouching company
of the ten, who did not want to be regarded as
mourners, and who, with occasional "sniffing," and
perhaps a surreptitious wiping of eyes with a shirt
cuff, were shuffling along with a poor affectation of
indifference.

In due course the last resting-place is reached,
and here are eight separate graves in a line, and at
the head of them stands the chaplain.  He has on
a college cap, a white surplice, riding breeches and
putties.  He reads the service with the utmost
impressiveness.  The men who form the firing party
and the escort are ranged round the place of burial
in precise military lines, and, in spite of the blazing
sun, every head is bared.  The words of the chaplain
alone break the silence, although now and then there
comes across the plain the boom of the naval gun.
And here, under the dazzling sky of Africa, and at
the foot of a kopje on the veldt, the eight dead are
laid in the ground.

There are no onlookers except myself and the
little group of ten.  They stand in a cluster at a
respectful distance.  Their heads are bare, and more
than one man has hidden his face in his helmet,
while others have turned their heads away so that
their mates shall not see their eyes.  Their pretence
at indifference and at having been drawn to the
funeral by mere curiosity is now of the very
slenderest.

As the graves are being filled up the funeral
party marches back to the camp with a brisk step.
The slovenly ten, who are not taking the part of
mourners, scatter.  They wander off in twos and
threes, and they have become curiously silent.  Some
have dragged out pipes from their pockets, and are
filling them absently.  One is whistling an incoherent
fragment of a tune.  They look towards the horizon,
and perhaps see nothing but the barren veldt, or
perhaps they see a familiar village in England, and
within a cottage in the small street the figure of a
woman with her face buried in her hands.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`ABSENT-MINDEDNESS`:

.. class:: center large

   XXV


.. class:: center medium

   ABSENT-MINDEDNESS

.. vspace:: 2

My small experience of the British soldier in the
field leads me to think that he does not altogether
deserve the title of the "absent-minded."  The
average soldier has, I think, the most anxious regard
for his belongings, and although that anxiety may
have been obscured or even dissipated by the
boisterous incidents which attend an embarkation
for the Cape, still when he reaches camp his mind
is much occupied with recollections of the people at
home, and with concern for their well-being.

Among the wounded were always those whose
first anxiety was as to the effect the news of their
injuries would have upon mothers, sweethearts, or
wives.  And many a message of consolation was
confided to the sympathising ears of the Sisters, and
many a letter of assurance was laboriously written
by those who had the strength to write.

In the matter of letters the soldier takes profound
interest.  He writes whenever he has the chance,
and makes a great deal of fuss about the performance.
To most of those in camp the posting of a letter
home is an event, and so precious is the pencilled
epistle that the writer will hesitate before he commits
it to the casual sack which is tied up to the fly of
the post office tent, and which appears scarcely
formal or official enough to receive the dirt-stained
dispatch.  For such dispatches, nothing less
pretentious than a post office building or an iron
letter-box seem fitting.

Many a time have I seen a letter dropped into
the sack with such an expression of insecurity, and
such evident feeling of hopelessness as to its safe
conduct, that the writer of the same has appeared
to regret that he had parted with it.  A post office
official in his shirt sleeves, with a pipe in his mouth
and a helmet on the back of his head, seems hardly
to be responsible enough for the occasion; and if
the letter-writer would venture to express a hope that
his elaborately directed letter "would be all right,"
the post office deity is apt to regard this concern
with flippancy.  "There's the sack!  Chuck the
blooming thing in.  It won't break," was about all
the comfort he would get.

The receipt of letters from home also was attended
with an eagerness which was hardly fitting in an
absent-minded man.  The sergeant with the bundle
of letters would read out the names on the envelopes
in a military voice, ferociously and without feeling,
and each man who got a missive grabbed it and
marched off with it with the alacrity of a dog who
has got a bone.  If he could find the shelter of a
wagon where the letter could be read unobserved
it was well.

The letters dictated to the Sisters in the hospital
were apt to be a little formal.  It seemed to be
thought proper that expression should be curbed,
and that the sensibilities of the Sister should be in
no way shocked by the revelation of a love passage.
One dying man, who was dictating a letter to his
mother, thought he would like to send with it a
last message to "his girl," and in answer to the
Sister's inquiry as to what she should write, modestly
said, "Give her my kind regards."

There need have been no precise decorum in the
wording of these last hopeless utterances, for if the
sender of the letter "sniffed" a little as he dictated
the message, the Sisters cried over them.

When a wounded man came to be stripped it
was common to find some precious keepsake or some
secret package hung about his neck, and to which
he clung with the earnestness of a worshipper to
his fetish.  One man particularly was much more
anxious about a locket that hung on his hairy chest
than he was about his wound.  He seemed to think
that so long as the cheap little trinket was not lost
his life mattered little.  In the operation tent he was
reluctant to take chloroform until a solemn promise
had been given that no harm should befall his locket,
and that it should not be removed from his neck,
I am afraid that the history of the locket ends here,
for the loyal man died.

Among the wounded brought in one day from
Potgieter's Drift was a man of scanty clothing, who
held something in his closed hand.  He had kept
this treasure in his hand for some eight hours.  He
showed it to the Sister.  It was a ring.  In
explanation he said, "My girl gave me this ring, and
when I was hit I made up my mind that the Boers
should never get it, so I have kept it in my fist,
ready to swallow it if I was taken before our
stretchers could reach me."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`AT CHIEVELEY AGAIN`:

.. class:: center large

   XXVI


.. class:: center medium

   AT CHIEVELEY AGAIN

.. vspace:: 2

On Sunday, February 11th, No. 4 Field Hospital
once more reached Chieveley, after the tedious
march from Spearman's of which mention has been
made.  The hospital was pitched near the station,
and not far from the spot it had occupied on the
day of the battle of Colenso.  Chieveley is
represented only by a railway station and a
station-master's house.  There are, however, many
eucalyptus trees about these buildings, and the spot
is shady.  The ground stands high, and miles of
undulating country are open to view.  There are a
Kaffir kraal or two in sight, and many mimosa
groves, and beyond them all the line of the river.
Chieveley, therefore, as a camp was well esteemed.

The sojourn at Chieveley began with that terrible
fourteen days of incessant fighting which ended in
the taking of Pieters and the relief of Ladysmith.
Every day at sunrise the guns began, and it was
not until sunset that they ceased.  Any who looked
up from their work in the camp, and turned their
eyes towards Umbulwana, would seldom fail to see
the flash of a lyddite shell on the far-off ridges, or,
clear against the blue sky, the white puff of cloud
from a shrapnel.  Every day the wounded came in,
mostly towards evening.  Fortunately their numbers
were few.

The days had again become very hot and very
trying.  It was weather which the soldier is apt to
describe, in the vivid language of his kind, as
weather "when a man should have his body in a
pool and his head in a public-house!"

Standing in the station at Chieveley was
commonly to be seen the armoured train.  Whatever
iron plates could do to make a structure indestructible
had been done; but to such beauty as a railway train
may possess nothing had thereby been added.  The
sailors had, however, been busy with the engine
of the train.  The engineers had given it the
outline of a square gasometer, but the "handy man"
had covered the disfigured machine with ropes as
with a garment.  From the top of the funnel a veil
of closely placed ropes trailed to the ground.  A
like panoply of ropes covered the body of the engine,
and its wheels, and its cylinders, and its every
detail.  The officers called this production the
"Russian poodle," but the soldiers gave it the name
of "Hairy Mary"; and this name clung to it.

During the movement to Spearman's, Chieveley
had been carefully fortified.  A space round the
station had been marked off by a very deep wire
entanglement.  Trenches had been dug, and some
sort of a fort thrown up.  There were entrenchments
about the stationmaster's mild little house, and before
the windows were erected iron plates with loopholes
such as were used on the trucks of the armoured
train.  Similar iron plates formed a barricade along
the modest veranda, and the result of it all was
that the small unobtrusive house was made to look
fierce and truculent.  The few bare rooms were used
by the Headquarters Staff, and the rough tables and
stools were littered with all sorts of war-like
paraphernalia.  Among these insignia of battle, murder,
and sudden death were two strange objects which
had been left behind by the looting Boers, and which
seemed out of place.  One was a stuffed jay, and
the other a dressmaker's lay-figure or "bust."  The
bird was stuck upon the wreck of the mantelpiece,
and stared amiably and foolishly from its perch.  The
"bust" was life-size, and suggested the torso of a
black woman, with a little polished knob for a head.
It may have at one time graced the salon of a
Parisian dressmaker.  It was, however, now no
longer used to show off dresses, trimmings and
flounces, for a helmet surmounted the graceful chest,
and belts, carrying pistols and swords, hung from
the fine shoulders or clung to the delicate waist.





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.. _`A JOURNEY TO LADYSMITH`:

.. class:: center large

   XXVII


.. class:: center medium

   A JOURNEY TO LADYSMITH

.. vspace:: 2

General Buller reached Ladysmith on March 1st,
and on Friday, March 2nd, I had the good fortune
to enter the town.  The journey was not accomplished
without difficulty.  It was necessary to follow
the road the army had taken, as the main road was
not known to be free from the enemy, and,
moreover, the bridge leading to it had been blown up.
The distance from Chieveley to Ladysmith by the
route taken was between twenty-three and twenty-four
miles.  I took my covered cart (called in the
camp the "'bus"), with ten mules and two Kaffir
"boys."  A man rode in front to pick out the
road.  With me came my remaining nurse, Miss
McCaul, and Mr. Day, an army chaplain.  We took
provisions, water, and forage for two days.

We left Chieveley at 6.30 a.m., and the first part
of the journey was across the battlefield of Colenso.
The road then became very rough, ran over ridges
and down into dongas, over boulders and deep into
ruts, so that the mules would now be at a fair trot and
now dragged to a standstill.  At last we reached the
hill commanding the pontoon bridge over the Tugela.
At the top of this precipitous height was the mighty
convoy of ox-wagons with food for Ladysmith.
The wagons could be counted by hundreds and
the cattle by thousands.  The hubbub could not be
surpassed.  The lowing of the oxen, the shrieking
of the Kaffir "boys," the bellowed orders of the
convoy conductors, the groaning of colliding
wagons, made a compound of sound worthy of the
occasion.  Among the rabble would be seen ambulance
wagons, water carts, isolated gun carriages and
ammunition wagons, bread carts, mounted officers
hurrying through, weary pickets returning to camp,
and a few "Tommies" tramping along with a cheery
indifference to the restless, struggling crowd.

The actual road above the pontoon was the very
steepest declivity I have ever seen negotiated by
structures on wheels.  The 'bus (empty of all
occupants) slid unsteadily down the incline, rocking like
a ship in a troubled sea, and the mules had to put
on their best pace to keep clear of the onrushing wheels.

The river at the point of crossing is extremely
picturesque.  The steep rugged banks are rendered
beautiful by mimosa and cactus, and below the
pontoons the torrent breaks into foaming rapids,
while up-stream is the celebrated waterfall of the
Tugela.  From the river the road wound on to the
foot of Umbulwana.  It ran across plains and down
into valleys, and over spruits and across boulders,
and through mimosa groves and over dusty wastes.
A river at the foot of the great hill was forded, and
as the mules were nearly carried off their feet, and
the wagon was flooded with the stream, we were
glad to land on the opposite bank.

The Boer camps through which the road led
showed every evidence of a hurried departure.  The
cooking pots were still on the camp fires; the rude
shelters under which our hardy enemy had lived were
still intact.  The ground was strewed with refuse,
with the remains of the last meal, with discarded
articles of clothing, with empty bottles and barrels,
with fragments of chairs and tables, with empty
flour sacks, and, above all, with the straw, which is
a feature of a Boer settlement.  There were no tents.
The shelters were made of boughs, of beams of wood
from adjacent farms, of iron railings, of barbed
wire, of plates of corrugated iron, of casual patches
of canvas, and of old sacks.  In some of the trenches
the shelters were more elaborate, and varied from
an almost shot-proof retreat to a simple tent, made
out of two raw cow skins stretched over bamboos.

These wild camps, amid a still wilder country,
suggested the conventional "brigand's retreat."  The
only evidences of a gentler mood were provided by
a discarded concertina and by a letter I picked up
on the roadside.  The letter was from a Boer wife
at the home farm to her husband in the trenches.
As we passed along the road we met with many
evidences of a hurried flight.  The dead horses were
very numerous; and left by the roadside, with traces
cut, were carts, light spider-carts, water carts, wagons,
and such cumbrous impedimenta as wheelbarrows
and a smith's forge.  One wagon had fallen headlong
into a donga in the dark, and was an utter wreck.

At last, on mounting the summit of a little ridge,
we saw before us a wide green plain of waving grass,
and beyond the plain and under the shelter of purple
hills lay the unhappy town of Ladysmith.  Ladysmith
looks very pretty at the distance--a cluster
of white and red roofs dotted about among trees,
and surmounted by the white tower of the Town Hall.

The military camps were placed at various points
about the town.  The first of these camps was that
of the gallant King's Royal Rifles.  They had made
some sort of home for themselves on the side of a
barren and stony hill.  They had, of course, no
tents, but had fashioned fantastic shelters out of
stone and wood and wire.  They had even burrowed
into the ground, and had returned to the type of
habitation common to primeval man.  Among the
huts and burrows were many paths worn smooth
by the restless tread of weary feet.  The path the
most worn of all was that which led to the water tanks.

The men themselves were piteous to see.  They
were thin and hollow-eyed, and had about them an
air of utter lassitude and weariness.  Some were
greatly emaciated, nearly all were pale, nearly all
were silent.  They had exhausted every topic of
conversation, it would seem, and were too feeble to
discuss even their relief.

Ladysmith was reached at 2.30 P.M., and the food
convoy did not arrive until late the same evening,
so we had the sad opportunity of seeing Ladysmith
still unrelieved--unrelieved so far as the misery of
hunger was concerned.  I had no food at my disposal,
but I had, fortunately, a good quantity of tobacco,
which was doled out in pipefuls so long as the supply
lasted.  It would have taken many pounds, however,
to satisfy the eager, wasted, trembling hands which
were thrust forward on the chance of getting a
fragment of the weed.

The town is composed almost entirely of single-storey
houses built of corrugated iron, with occasional
walls of brick or cement.  In the suburbs of the
town these houses are made as villa-like as possible
by means of verandahs and flower gardens and
creepers.  The main street of the town, however,
has no pretensions to beauty, and is merely a
broad road with corrugated iron shops on either side.

On walking into "Starvation City," one's first
impression was that of the utter emptiness of the
place.  Most of the villas were unoccupied, were
closed up, and, indeed, barricaded.  The gardens
were neglected, and everything had run wild.  The
impression of desolation was accentuated by an
occasional house with a hole in its roof or its wall due
to a Boer shell.  All the people we met were pallid
and hollow-eyed, and many were wasted.  All were
silent, listless, and depressed.  There were no
evidences of rejoicing, no signs of interest or
animation, and, indeed, as I have just said, Ladysmith was
still unrelieved.  Nearly every shop was closed or
even barricaded.  Sign-boards showed that here was
a coach builder, and there a grocer.  The chemist's
shop appeared to be empty of everything except
the coloured water in the large bottles in the
window.  Such shops as were open were dark and
desolate.

There were many grim evidences of better days.
Thus one restaurant presented, among other cheery
signs, the announcement of "Meals at all hours."  Another
establishment was gay with placards of "Ice
creams."  Notices of groceries of all kinds for sale
made radiant a shop which was empty of everything
but a table and some rough chairs.

Such was the aspect of the weary town.  Streets
empty of all but a few tired and listless men, stores
without goods, shops without customers, a railway
station without passengers, a post office without
letters, stamps, or post cards.  No words, indeed,
can fully describe this city of desolation, this little
colony of the almost hopeless, this poor, battered,
worn-out, hungry town of Ladysmith, with a bright
summer sun making mockery of its dismal streets.

The wretchedness of the place was not mitigated
by the horrible smells which greeted one at every
corner, nor by the miserable, dirty river which
crawled slimily through the place.

We left the town about 5 P.M., and met on our
way back the long convoy of wagons with food.  It
was dark when we reached the river by Umbulwana;
and as it was dangerous, and, indeed, impossible to
cross the drift except in daylight, we outspanned
by the river bank and made a pretence of sleeping.

When yet it was dark on the following morning
the mules were put in, and with the earliest streak
of dawn we crossed the river and made for Colenso.
The wagons were still toiling onwards towards Ladysmith.

The road, as I have said, was very rough, and
the poor cart, which had served me well for three
months, began to show signs of giving out.  It
broke down at last, one of the wheels coming to
pieces.  We were then some seven miles from Colenso,
and the vehicle was beyond all repair.  So it was
left by the roadside among other wreckage, a forlorn
relic of what was once a smart "'bus."  Our very
scanty luggage was packed upon the mules' backs,
our remaining food was distributed among the
passers-by, and we proceeded to walk to Colenso.
From Colenso we travelled to Chieveley by a casual
goods train, sitting on the floor of an open truck,
as there was no guard's van.  We reached Chieveley
on Saturday at 1 P.M., tired and dirty.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A STRAGGLER`:

.. class:: center large

   XXVIII


.. class:: center medium

   A STRAGGLER

.. vspace:: 2

The photograph which is appended to this
paragraph was taken during the course of our journey
to Ladysmith.  The scene is on the north bank of
the Great Tugela below the waterfall, and close to
the pontoon bridge by which the troops had crossed
on their victorious march.  Sitting in the sun on a
pile of timbers, which the engineers have left, is a
typical straggler.  His company has moved on to
Pieters, and he has fallen out somehow and somewhere
on the march, and is following the lost column
as best he can.

The day is hot, and his jacket is thrown across
his shoulders.  A small cloud of flies buzz over
him.  He is tired, dirty, thirsty, and hungry.  Fever
has taken hold of him, and he is--as he would
say--feeling "a bit thick."  He is sitting by the river
bank to await the first wagon across the pontoon
on which a conductor will give him a lift.  In the
meantime some good Samaritan is getting him a
drink of water from the stream.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`HOW A SURGEON WON THE VICTORIA CROSS`:

.. class:: center large

   XXIX


.. class:: center medium

   HOW A SURGEON WON THE VICTORIA CROSS

.. vspace:: 2

On December 15th was fought the battle of Colenso,
on the morning of a brilliant summer's day.  At
dawn the men had marched out eagerly and in keen
spirits, and with a swing of the shoulders which
told of a certain victory.  Before sundown they were
beaten back, more than a thousand dead and wounded
were lying on the field, the hospital tents were
crammed to overflowing, and the wagons, which
were prepared to move forwards, were moving back.

The small hamlet of Colenso, battered, empty,
and woe-begone, stands on the south bank of the river,
and clings about the railway as a homely, unpretending
little settlement made up of a few corrugated
iron cottages on either side of a single street.

It looks almost like a toy village, and its prim
formality is tempered by a friendly growth of cactus,
aloes, and mimosa, by a few trees and by many
gardens.  Behind Colenso is the veldt, which here
extends southwards as a vast undulating plain to
Chieveley, Frere, and Estcourt.  Between Chieveley
and the river the veldt is smooth, and is broken only
by ant-hills, by a few Kaffir kraals, and by the
precise line of the railway.  The plain is green, but it
is not the luxuriant green of England, and in the
early morning and about the time of the setting
sun, tints of yellow and brown and pink spread over
the wold and render the place strangely beautiful.

During the glare of noonday the veldt gives
simply a blinding sense of scorched and faded green
and its monotony and its boundlessness, and the utter
lack of shade and variation, make the expanse dreary
as a desert.

Beyond the village the brown torrent of the great
Tugela tears seawards between high banks and under
broken bridges, and among the *débris* of pitiless
ruin.  Across the river are the bare, stony,
trench-lined kopjes and hills held for so many long weeks
by the Boers.  About the foot of these bastion-like
ridges is the squalor of a neglected camp, and on
all sides are rifle pits and trenches and stone shelters
and hidden holes.  Man seems on this river bank
to have gone back to the savagery of the cave dweller,
and to be once more crawling on the earth.  Beyond
these low hills are the grey heights of Umbulwana
towering over Ladysmith.

It was to the right of Colenso that the battle
raged fiercest on December 15th, 1899.  It was here
that Colonel Long's batteries of field artillery were
surprised by the enemy and were abandoned after a
hideous sacrifice of horses and men.  It was here
that Lieutenant Roberts received his fatal wound, and
it was here that Babtie won the Victoria Cross.

The batteries were moving towards the river with
the usual British unconcern, and in the quiet of a
summer's morning.  Suddenly there was poured upon
them from the shelter of a mimosa wood such a
torrent of lead that in a few moments there was
scarcely a horse or a man standing.  The men faced
the wood as only the British soldier can face death.
The gallant attempts made to save the guns led only
to further loss of life.  Colonel Long had been shot
down, some fifty horses had been sacrificed, and the
scanty ranks of the English were thinning rapidly.
Still the cry went up, "Hold fast to the guns!"
and when the last forlorn hope had been attempted
and had failed, the green veldt was littered with the
wounded, the dying, and the dead.

Near by the guns was a donga, and into this
many of the wounded had crawled.  The galloper
who took up the news of the disaster reported the
need of help for the injured.  To this call Major
Babtie, R.A.M.C., at once responded as a volunteer.
His duty did not take him to the battlefield.  He
rode down to this Inferno.  He might as well have
ridden before a row of targets during the smartest
moment of rifle practice.  Three times was his horse
shot under him before he reached the donga.  Here,
in the face of a galling fire, he dragged the wounded
into shelter, and a little later he ventured out under
a rain of lead to bring in Lieutenant Roberts, who
was lying in the open desperately wounded.

For some seven hours Babtie kept by the wounded
in the shallow donga, no one daring to lift a head
above the edge of the dip.  He alone had a
water-bottle, and he doled out what water he had in a
60-minim measuring glass.  He was also able to
relieve pain by morphine, and when not otherwise
occupied he sheltered poor Roberts's face from the
scorching sun by holding above it a letter he chanced
to have in his pocket.  It was not until darkness
was setting in that it was possible to venture from
the scant shelter the donga provided.

The scene of this heroic act was a level stretch
of green veldt lying between the river and a brown
road which led with many desultory turns to Hlangwani.
To the left were the village and gardens of
Colenso, and to the right the grove of mimosa trees
in which the Boer force was hidden.  Beyond the
river rose the enemy's entrenchments and the grim
ridge of Grobler's Kloof.

The last time I passed over this spot was on the
day after our cavalry had reached Ladysmith.  It
was on a day of peace.  The sky was cloudless and
no breath of air stirred along the grass.  The bodies
of the horses belonging to the lost guns were lying
in a long line across the veldt.  Their bones were
as white as are the bones of museum skeletons, for
the vultures and the ants had done their work
thoroughly.  The hides were still drawn over the
bleaching bones, and round the necks of these
ill-fated beasts were still the collars and the harness by
which they had dragged the guns into action.  There
was an absolute stillness over the whole scene.  To
the left a train was being shunted at Colenso station
with leisurely persistence, for the day was hot and
the sun dazzling.  To the right were the mimosa
groves, glorious with yellow blossom, in the shadows
of which the Boers had hidden.  It was strange that
it was from these dainty woods that the hellish fire
had poured forth which laid low so many gallant
English lads, for on this quiet day the trees were
busy with complaining doves.

By the banks of the donga, which had been for
a whole summer's day a valley of the shadow of
death, a Kaffir was crooning over a concertina, from
which came a lazy, dirge-like music.

The railway engine, the doves, and the rapt Kaffir
were the sole moving objects in this garden of peace,
and in the blue distance was the ridge of Grobler's
Kloof, no longer belching fire and shell, but standing
out delicately against the tender sky.

No brave deed had ever a gentler setting.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`"SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI"`:

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   XXX


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   "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI."

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"The Glory of the World," as the soldier sees it,
can be understood by most of us.  There is the glory
of having served his Queen and his country, and of
having done his duty like a man.  There is, probably,
the glorious memory of some great charge and of
the storming of some stubborn trench.  And there
is the home-coming, made glorious by the ringing
of bells and the waving of flags, by a march through
familiar streets and through shouting and cheering
crowds, with the rattle of drums and fifes, with
hurrahs and yells of welcome for the regiment he
loves so well.  A home-coming like this is worth
many days of hardship, many a Spion Kop, and
many a dull week in a hospital tent.  But it does
not fall to the lot of all.

I remember at Chieveley one morning before
breakfast watching a solitary man approach the
hospital lines.  He was as melancholy an object as
ever a war has produced.  He was a soldier who
had fought at Colenso, at Vaal Krantz, and before
Pieters, and he was now staggering towards the
hospital, a ragged, broken-down, khaki-coloured
spectre of a man.  He dragged his rifle along with
him; his belt was gone; his helmet was poised at
the back of his head; his frowsy tunic was thrown
over his shoulders; he was literally black with flies.
His clothes had not been off for many days, and he
had missed the ambulance, he said, and had walked
to the hospital.

How far he had come he could not tell, nor could
anyone gather how he had fared or where he had
slept.  All that was evident was that he was wet with
dew and had spent the night in the open.  He knew
that for vague hours he had been making his way,
with ever faltering steps and failing eyes, towards
the red cross flag on the crest of the hill.  And now
he had reached it.  As to why he had come: "Well! he
had a touch of the dysentery," he said, "and
was about played out."

Poor lad! this was a sorry home-coming at the
last.  A squalid ending of a march; staggering in
alone, a shuffling wreck, without a single comrade,
with no fifes and drums, no cheering crowd, and no
proud adoration of mother or wife.  He was helped
to a bell tent and put to bed on a stretcher, and on
the stretcher he died; and this was the end of his
soldiering.  *Sic transit gloria mundi*!

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   LONDON, E.C.

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