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At one of these services a sergeant of the 12th Lancers was present; and his was just a typical case. It was at the battle of Magersfontein we had last met. On that memorable morning he and his troop rode past me to the fight; we grasped hands, whispered one to the other "494"; and then parted to meet months after, unharmed amid all peril, in our Father's House in Bloemfontein. The thrill of such a meeting, which represents cases of that kind by the score, no one can fully understand till it becomes inwoven in his own experience. So we met, and remembering the way our God had led us, we sang as few men could

"Praise ye the Lord! 'tis good to raise Your hearts and voices in His praise!"

How good, supremely good, I have no words to tell!

On that Easter afternoon there came a sudden summons to conduct another soldier's funeral. For a full hour and a half I watched and waited beyond the appointed time, while the digging of a shallow grave in difficult ground was being laboriously completed; and then in the name of Him who is the "Resurrection and the Life," we laid our soldier-brother in his lowly resting place, enwrapped only in his soldier-blanket. Meanwhile, in accordance with a touching Anglican custom, there came into the cemetery a long procession of choir boys and children singing Easter hymns, joining in Easter liturgies, and then proceeding to lay on the new made graves an offering of Easter flowers.

At the Easter evening service I was surprised to see in the Wesleyan church another dense mass of khaki. Every man had been required to procure a separate personal "pass" in order to be present, and the evening was full of threatenings, threatenings that in due time justified themselves by a terrific thunderstorm, which resulted in nearly every tunic being drenched before it could reach its sheltering tent. Yet in spite of such forbiddings the men came in from the outlying camps, literally by hundreds, to attend that Easter evening service; and I deemed their presence there a notable tribute to the spiritual efficiency of spiritual work among our troops the wide world over.

At the gate were some soldiers in charge of a mule waggon on which lay the body of a negro, awaiting burial. In the service of our common Queen that representative of the black-skinned race had just laid down his life. Inside the gates two graves were being dug; one by a group of Englishmen for an English comrade, and one by a group of Canadians for a comrade lent to us for kindred service by "Our Lady of the Snows." So now are lying side by side in South African soil these two typical representatives of the principal sections of the Anglo-Saxon race; their lives freely given, like that of their black brother, in the service and defence of one common heritage--that Christian empire which surely God himself has builded. Camp and cemetery alike teach one common lesson, and by the lips of the living and the dead enforce attention to the same vast victorious fact! Next day it was an Australian officer I saw laid in that same treasure-house of dead heroes. He that hath eyes to see let him see! This deplorable war, which thus brought together from afar the builders and binders of the empire, in an altogether amazing measure made them thereby of one mind and heart. It is life arising out of death; and surely every devout-minded Englishman will learn at last to say "This is the Lord's doing; and it is marvellous in our eyes!"

The first military funeral since the reoccupation of Bloemfontein by the British it fell to my lot to conduct two days after our arrival. A fine young guardsman who had taken part in each of our four famous battles, and in our recent march, just saw this goal of all our hopes and died. The fatal symptoms were evidently of a specially alarming type, for he was hastily buried with all his belongings, his slippers, his iron mug, his boots, his haversack, and the very stretcher on which he lay; then over all was poured some potent disinfectant. It was a gruesome sight! So to-day he lies in the self-same cemetery where rests many a British soldier who fell not far away in the fights of fifty years ago. It was British soil in those distant days, and is British soil again, but at how great cost we were now about to learn.

That guardsman was the first fruits of a vast ingathering. In the course of the next few weeks over 6000 cases of enteric sprang up in the immediate neighbourhood of that one little town; and 1300 of its victims were presently laid in that same cemetery, which now holds so much of the empire's best, and towards which so many a mother-heart turns tearfully from almost every part of the Anglo-Saxon world. It was the after-math of Paardeberg, which claimed more lives long after, than in all its hours of slowly intensifying agony! Boers and Britons, both together, there were vastly fewer who sighed their last beside the Modder River banks than the sequent fever claimed at Bloemfontein; and all through the campaign the loss of life caused by sickness has been so much larger than through wounds as to justify the soldiers' favourite dictum respecting it: "Better three hits than one enteric."

Such an epidemic, laying hold as it did in the course of a few weeks of one in five of all the troops within reach of Bloemfontein, is quite unexampled in the history of recent wars; and the Royal Army Medical Corps can scarcely be censured for being unable to adequately cope with it. They were 900 miles from their base, with only a broken railway by which to bring up supplies. The little town, already so severely commandeered by the Boers, could furnish next to nothing in the way of medical comforts or necessities. Every available bed, or blanket, or bit of sheeting, was bought up by the authorities; but if every private bedroom in the place had been ransacked, the requirements of the case even then could scarcely have been met. Possibly that ought to have been done, but all through this campaign our army rulers have been excessively tender-handed in such matters; forgetting that clemency to the vanquished is often cruelty to the victors. So in Bloemfontein healthy civilians, whether foes or friends, slept on feather beds, while suffering and delirious soldiers were stretched on an earthen floor that was sodden with almost incessant rain. Neither for that rain can the army doctors be held responsible, though it almost drove them to despair. Nor was it their fault that the Boers were allowed at this very time to capture the Bloemfontein waterworks, and shatter them. Bad water at Paardeberg caused the epidemic. Bad water at Bloemfontein brought it to a climax. In this little city of the sick the medical men had at one time a constant average of 1800 sufferers on their hands; mostly cases of enteric which, as truly as shot and shell, shows no respect of persons. Not only our fighting-men--soldiers of high degree and low degree alike--but non-combatants, chaplains, army scripture readers, war correspondents, doctors, and army nurses, it remorselessly claimed and victimised. In such a campaign the fighting line is not the chief point of peril, nor the fighting soldiers the only sufferers. Hospital work has its heroes, though not its trumpeters, and many a man of the Royal Army Medical Corps has as faithfully won his medal as any that handled rifle.

Our "Kopje-Book Maxims" told us that "two horses are enough to shift a camp--provided they are dead enough." Either the camp or the horses must be quickly shifted if pestilence is to be kept at bay; yet in spite of all shiftings, of all sanitary searchings and strivings, the fever refused to shift; the field hospitals were from the first hopelessly crowded out; and the city of death would quickly have become the city of despair, but for the timely arrival of sundry irregular helpers and organisations that had been lavishly equipped and sent out by private beneficence. Such was the huge Portman Hospital. In the Ramblers' Club and Grounds, the Longman Hospital was housed; and here I found Conan Doyle practising the healing art with presumably a skill rivalling that with which he penned his superb detective tales. In the forsaken barracks of the Orange Free State soldiery, the Sydney doctors established their house of healing, assisted by ambulance men and ambulance appliances unsurpassed by anything of the kind employed in any other part of Africa. Australia, like her sister colonies, sent to us her best; and bravely they bore themselves beside our best.

To relieve the pressure thus created almost every public building in the town was requisitioned for hospital purposes; schools and clubs and colleges, the nunnery, the lunatic asylum, and even the stately Parliament Hall with its marble entrance and sumptuous fittings. The presidential chair, behind the presidential desk, still retained its original place on the presidential platform; but,--"how are the mighty fallen!" I saw it occupied by an obscure hospital orderly who was busy filling up a still more obscure hospital schedule. The whole floor of the building was so crowded with beds that all the senatorial chairs and desks had perforce been removed. The Orange Free State senators sitting on those aforesaid chairs had resolved in secret session, only a few eventful months before, to hurl in England's face an Ultimatum that made war inevitable, and brought our batteries and battalions to their very doors. But now they were fugitives every one from the city of their pride, which they had surrendered without striking a solitary blow for its defence; while the actual building in which their lunacy took final shape, and launched itself on an astonished Christendom, I beheld full to overflowing with the deadly fruit of their doing. In the very presence of the president's chair of state, here a Boer, there a Briton, it may be of New Zealand birth or Canadian born, moaned out his life, and so made his last mute protest against the outrage which rallied a whole empire in passionate self-defence.

The following letter by the Rev. T. F. Falkner refers to this period, and was sent originally to the Chaplain-General; but is here published, slightly abridged, as an excellent illustration of the spirit and work of the many chaplains of the Church of England who have taken part in this campaign:--

"We had an excellent meeting in connection with the A.T.A. in the Bloemfontein Town Hall last night, with Lord Roberts in the chair. He spoke admirably; and though most of the troops were out of the city the hall was full."

THROUGH WORLDS UNKNOWN AND FROM WORLDS UNKNOWN

During this six weeks of tarrying at Bloemfontein I found myself able to visit a most interesting Methodist family residing some twenty miles south of the town. For my sole benefit the express to the Cape was stopped at a certain platelayer's hut, and then a walk of about a mile across the veldt brought me to the pleasant country house of a venerable widow lady. Her belongings had of course been freely commandeered by the Boers on the outbreak of war; nor had the sons, being burghers, though loyal-hearted Britishers, been able to elude their liability to bear arms against their own kin. The two youngest, schoolboys still, though of conscript age, had been sent down south betimes; and so were well out of harm's way, but the two elder were not suffered to thus escape. One as a despatch rider, and one as a commissariat officer, they were compelled to serve a cause that did violence to their deepest convictions. On the first appearance therefore of the British, both brothers following the bidding of strongest blood bonds, transferred their allegiance, if not their service, to the other side. Thereupon they were so incessantly threatened with a volley of avenging Boer bullets they felt compelled to take a holiday trip to the Cape. Thus was their gentle mother with war still raging round her gates bereft of the presence, protection, and sorely needed aid of all her sons.

We arranged for the holding in her home of an Easter Sunday evening service; and then returning to the railway were cheered by the speedy sight of a goods train bound for Bloemfontein. Whereupon I scrambled on to the top of a heavily loaded truck, and there, being a first-class passenger provided with a first-class ticket, travelled in first-class style, sitting awkwardly astride of nobody knows what. On the same truck rode a Colonial, an English cavalryman, and a Hindu who courteously threw over me a handsome rug when the chilly eve closed in upon us. A decidedly representative group were we atop that truck-load of miscellaneous munitions of war. And on into the darkness, and through the darkness, we thus rode till late at night we reached the lights of Bloemfontein.

While the afternoon was still new we heard on our near left the sound of heavy shell firing; of which, however, the men took no more notice than if they had been manoeuvring on Salisbury Plain. They marched on as stolidly and cheerily as ever, chatting and laughing as they marched. But presently there broke upon our ears the familiar sound of the pom-pom, which months ago at the Modder had so shaken everybody's nerves. Instantly there burst from the whole brigade a cry of recognition, and every man instinctively perceived that some grim business had begun. Another Sunday battle was raging just over the ridge, and the rest of that day's march had for its accompaniment the music of pom-poms, the rattle of rifle fire, and the thud of shells. But at the close of the day an officer somewhat discontentedly reported that "if" our artillery had only reached a certain place by a certain time, something splendid would have happened. Many of our rat-traps proved thus weak in the spring, and snapped too slowly, specially on Sundays. Some such disastrous "if" seemed to spring up in connection with most of our Sunday fights, though we still seem to cling fondly to the belief that for fighting the Lord's battles the Lord's day is of all days incomparably the best. It was on Sunday, December 10th, the disastrous attack on Stormberg was delivered; and on the evening of that same fatal Sunday the Highland Brigade marched out of the Modder River Camp to meet their doom on Magersfontein. Similarly on the night of Sunday, January 22nd, our men set out to win, and lose, Spion Kop. The Paardeberg calamity, the costliest of all our contests, was also a Sunday fight; and though in the face of such facts no man may dogmatise, such coincidences, all happening in the course of a few weeks, in the conduct of the same war, make one wonder whether Sunday is really a lucky day for purposes so dread, and whether the Boers are not justified in their supposed refusal to fight on Sundays excepting in self-defence. In that respect, I at any rate, am with the Boers as against the Britons.

When night at last arrived, we had neither tents nor shelters of any sort provided for us, though the cold was searching, and everything around us was wet with heavy dew. Men and officers alike spread their waterproof sheets on the bare ground, and then made the best they could of one or two blankets in which to wrap themselves. Through the kindness, however, of my quartermaster friend, since dead, I was privileged to push my head and shoulders under a transport waggon which effectually sheltered me from wind and wet; and there, in the midst of mules and men, mostly darkies, I slept the sleep of the weary.

Brief rest, however, of a more delicious kind I had already found in the course of that toilsome afternoon tramp described above. During a short halt by the way I lay upon my back watching a huge cloud of locusts flying far overhead, and thinking tenderly of those just then assembling at our Aldershot Sunday afternoon service of song, not forgetting the gentle lady who usually presides at the piano there. Then I took out my pocket Testament, and read Romans xii.: "If thine enemy hunger, feed him." But about that precise moment the adjoining kopje, with a shaking emphasis, said to me, "pom-pom," and again "pom-pom." But how to feed one's enemy while thus he speaks with defiant throat of brass, is a problem that still awaits a satisfactory solution!

In the course of the day I was greatly touched by the sight of an artillery horse that had fallen from uttermost fatigue, so that it had to be left to its fate on the pitiless veldt. It was now separated from its team, and all its harness had been removed; but when it found itself being deserted by its old companions in distress and strife, it cast after them a most piteous look, struggled, and struggled again to get on to its feet, and finally stood like a drunken man striving to steady himself, but absolutely unable to go a single step further. Ah, the bitterness alike for men and horses of such involuntary and irrecoverable falling out from the battle-line of life! Not actual dying, but this type of death is what some most dread!

When on Monday we resumed our march, it was still to the sound of the same iron-mouthed music; but now at last we could not only hear, but see some of the shell fire, and watch a few of the men that were taking part in the fight. Far away we noticed what looked like a line of beetles, each a good space from his fellow beetles, creeping towards the top of a ridge. These were some of our mounted men. Lower down the slope, but moving in the same direction, was a similar line of what looked like bees. These were some of our infantry, on whom the altogether invisible Boers were evidently directing their fire. As you must first catch your hare before you can cook it, so you must first sight a Boer before you can shift him; and the former task is frequently the more difficult of the two. In more senses than one short-sighted soldiers have had their day; and in all ranks those who cannot look far ahead must give place to those who can. Henceforth the most powerful field-glasses that can possibly be made, and the most perfect telescopes, must be supplied to all our officers; or on a still more disastrous scale than in this war the bees will drop their bullets among the beetles, and Britons will be killed by Britons.

Later in the day, to my sincere grief, a beautiful Boer house was set on fire by our men, after careful inquiry into the facts by the provost-marshal, because the farmer occupying it had run up the white flag over his house, and then from under that flag our scouts had been shot at. Such acts of treachery became lamentably common, and had at all cost to be restricted by the only arguments a Voortrekker seemed able to understand; but the Boers in Natal had long before this proved adepts at kindling similar bonfires, though without any such provocation, and cannot therefore pose as martyrs over the burning of their own farms, however deplorable that burning be.

At Talana Hill, our first battle in Natal, the beaten Boers raised a white flag on a bamboo pole, but when our gunners thereupon ceased firing, "the brother" instead of surrendering bolted! At Colenso, a company of burghers with rifles flung over their backs, and waving a white flag, approached within a short distance of the foremost British trenches, but when our troops raised their heads to welcome these surrendering foes, they were instantly stormed at by shot and shell. At length General Buller found it necessary in face of such frequent treachery, officially to warn his whole army to be on their guard against the white flag, a flag which to his personal knowledge was already through such misuse stained with the blood of two gallant British officers, besides many men.

It is said that when Sir Burne Jones' little daughter was once in such a specially angry mood as to scratch and bite and spit, her father somewhat roughly shook the child and said, "I do not see what has got into you, Millicent; the devil must teach you these things." Whereupon, the little one indignantly flashed back this reply:--"Well the devil may have taught me to scratch and bite, but the spitting is my own idea!" With equal justice the Boers may claim that though the ordinary horrors and agonies of war are of the devil, this persistent abuse of the white flag is their own idea. Of that practice they possess among civilized nations an absolute monopoly, and the red cross flag has often fared no better at their hands.

But then it would be absurd and most unfair to blame the two Republics as a whole for this. No people on earth would approve such practices, and doubtless they were as great a pain to many an honourable Boer as they were to us. But upland farmers who have spent their lives in fighting savage beasts, and still more savage men, are slow to distinguish between lawful tricking and unlawful treachery, and are apt to account all things fair that help to win the game.

During this long trek through worlds unknown, our pet lamb, perchance taking encouragement from the example of the two chaplains, followed us all the way on foot, and became quite soldierly in its tastes and tendencies. It scorned even to look at its brother sheep on the veldt modestly feeding on coarse veldt grass; but on sardines and bacon-fat it seemed to thrive astonishingly; and both my bread and sugar it coolly commandeered. So rapid and complete is camp-life education, even when a pet lamb is the pupil!

On the morning of our fifth day in "worlds unknown" we breakfasted soon after four, by starlight; and before sunrise were again trekking hard. About ten miles brought our almost interminable string of waggons to two ugly river drifts, across which, with much toil and shouting they were at last safely dragged. Then we suddenly halted and to our amazement were ordered to return whence we came. So across those two ugly drifts the waggons were again dragged; four o'clock in the afternoon found us on the precise spot where four o'clock in the morning had watched us breakfasting; and by the afternoon of the following Sunday we were back in Bloemfontein from which on the previous Sunday we had made so bold a dash for fame and fortune. In the course of those eight excessively toilsome days the Guards had captured three wounded Boers; but what else they had accomplished no one could ever guess. Somebody said, however, that something wonderful had been done by somebody somewhere in connection with that week of wonders; which was of course consoling; but it was only long after we learned that De Wet after laying siege to Wepener for seventeen days had made a sudden rush to reach his sure retreat in the north-east corner of the Free State; that we with other columns had been sent out to intercept him; and had as by a hair's breadth just managed to miss him. Such are the fortunes and misfortunes of war. As an attacking force, De Wet in the course of the war made some bold and brilliant moves, though always on a comparatively small scale; but in the art of running away and escaping capture, no matter by whom pursued, he has given himself more practice than probably any other general that ever lived. "Oh my God make him like a wheel!" We were a lumbering waggon chasing a light-winged wheel; and the wheel was winner!

While on this long trek I lighted on a newly-arrived contingent of Canadian mounted infantry which had come to our aid from worlds unknown. They proved to be a splendid body of men, and worthy compatriots of the earlier arrived Canadians who had rendered such heroic service at Paardeberg. Their Methodist chaplain, the Rev. Mr Lane, of Nova Scotia, seemed incontestably built on the same lines; a conspicuously strong man was he, and delightfully level-headed. I therefore all the more deeply deplored the early and heavy failure of his health, as the result of the severe hardships that hang round every campaigner's path, and his consequent return, invalided home.

From start to finish the Bushmen were accompanied by an earnest Methodist chaplain, whom I met only in Pretoria, the Rev. James Green, who, most fortunately, throughout the whole campaign, was not laid aside for a single day by wounds or sickness; and who, after returning home with this time-expired first contingent of Australian troops, came back in March 1902 with what, we hope, the speedy ending of the war will make their last contingent.

Between Mr Green's two terms of service I was, however, ably assisted by yet another Australian Wesleyan chaplain, the Rev. R. G. Foreman, though he, like so many others, was early invalided home.

QUICK MARCH TO THE TRANSVAAL

It was with feelings of unfeigned delight that the Guards learned May Day was to witness the beginning of another great move towards Pretoria. We had entered Bloemfontein without expending upon it a single shot; we had been strangely welcomed with smiles and cheers and waving flags and lavish hospitality; but none the less that charming little capital had made us pay dearly for its conquest, and for our six weeks of so-called rest on the sodden veldt around it. Its traders had levied heavy toll on the soldiers' slender pay; and no fabled monster of ancient times ever claimed so sore a tribute of human lives. It was not on the veldt but under it that hundreds of our lads found rest; and hundreds more were soon to share their fate. The victors had become victims, and the vanquished were avenged. Seldom have troops taken possession of any city with such unmixed satisfaction, or departed from it with such unfeigned eagerness.

My quartermaster friend and myself, unable to start with the Brigade, set out a few hours later, and tarried for the night at a Hollander platelayer's hut. The man spoke little English, and we less Dutch; but he welcomed us to the hospitality of his two-roomed home with a warmth that was overwhelming. His wife, when the war began, was sent away for safety's sake; and married men thus flung back upon their bachelorhood make poor cooks and caterers unless they happen to be soldiers on the trek; but this man, in his excitement at having such guests to entertain, expectorated violently all over the floor on which presently we expected to sleep; fire was soon kindled and coffee made; the quartermaster produced some tinned meat; I produced some tinned fruit; the ganger produced some tinned biscuits--in this campaign we have been saved by tin--and so by this joint-stock arrangement there was provided a feast that hungry royalty need not have disdained. Next our entertainer undertook to amuse his guests, and did it in a fashion never to be forgotten. He produced a box fitted up as a theatre stage--all made out of his own head, he said--and mostly wooden; there were two puppets on the stage, which were made to dance most vigorously by means of cords attached secretly to the ganger's foot, whilst his hands were no less vigorously employed on the concertina which provided the accompanying dance music. This delighted old man was the oddest figure of the three, as the perspiration poured down his grimy face. To light on such a comedy when on the war path would have been enough to make Momus laugh; and when the laugh was spent we swept the floor, for reasons already hinted at, sought refuge in our blankets; and long before breakfast time next morning landed in Karee Camp.

To reach Karee we passed through "The Glen" lying beside the Upper Modder, where a deplorable tragedy had occurred not long before. A remarkably fine-looking sergeant of the Guards went to bathe in what he supposed were the deep waters of the Modder, and dived gleefully into deeps that alas were not deep. Striking the bottom with his head, instantly his neck was dislocated, and when I saw him a few hours after, though he was perfectly conscious and anxiously hopeful, he was paralysed from his shoulders downwards. A married man, his heart, too, was broken over such an undreamed of disaster, and in three weeks he died. The mauser is not the only reaping-machine the great harvester employs in war time. There have been over five hundred "accidental" deaths in the course of this campaign. At the Lower Modder we once arranged to hold a Sunday morning service for the swarms of native drivers in our camp, but in that case also were compelled to prove it is the unexpected that happens. One of the "boys" went to bathe that morning in the suddenly swollen river; he sank; and though search parties were at once sent out, the body was never recovered. So instead of a service we had this sad sensation.

About that same time, and in that same camp, one of my most intimate companions, the quartermaster of the Scots Guards, was one moment laughing and chatting with me in his tent; but the next moment, without the slightest warning, he dropped back on his couch, and that same evening was laid by his sorrowing battalion in a garden-grave. The other quartermaster, who shared with me the ganger's hospitality and laughter, when the campaign was near its close, was found lying on the floor of his tent. He had fallen when no friendly hand was near to help, and had been dead for hours when discovered. My first campaign, and last, has stored my mind with tragic memories; it has filled my heart with tendernesses unfelt before; and perchance has taught me to interpret more truly that "life of lives" foreshadowed in Isaiah's saying: "Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows."

Yet from this point onward there was astonishingly little fighting. Before the campaign was over some of the guardsmen wore out several pairs of boots, but scarcely fired another bullet. The Boers were so out-manoeuvred that their mausers and machine-guns availed them little. They fought scarcely any but rear-guard actions, and their retreat was so rapid as to be almost a rout. Within about a month of leaving Bloemfontein the Guards' Brigade was in Pretoria; which, considering all they had to carry, and the constant repairing of the railway line required from day to day, would be considered good marching even if there had been no pom-poms planted to oppose progress.

When we left Karee it was confidently predicted that the Boers would make a stiff stand amid the kopjes which guard the prettily placed and prettily planted little town of Brandfort. So the next day and the day after we walked warily, while cannon to right of us and cannon to left of us volleyed and thundered. Little harm was however done; and as the second afternoon hastened to its sunset hour, we were gleefully informed that "the brother" had once more "staggered humanity" by a precipitate retreat from positions of apparently impregnable strength. So Brandfort passed into our hands for all that it was worth, which did not seem to be much; but what little there was, no man looted. All was bought and paid for as in Piccadilly; but at more than Piccadilly prices. Whatever else however could be purchased, no liquor was on sale; no intemperance was seen; no molestation of woman or child took place. So was it with rare exceptions from the very first; so was it with very rare exceptions to the very last.

In this respect my assistant-chaplain, the Rev. W. Burgess, assures me that his experience tallies with mine, and he told me this tale as illustrative of it. At Hoekfontein he called at a farmhouse close to our camp, and in it he found an old woman of seventy and her husband, of whom she spoke as nearly ninety. "Do you believe in God?" she asked the chaplain, and added, "so do I, but I believe in hell as well; and would fling De Wet into it if I could." Then she proceeded to explain that her first husband was killed in the last war; that of her three sons commandeered in this war one was already slain, and that when the other two returned from the fighting line De Wet at once sent to fetch them back.

"But look at the broken panel of that door," said the old lady. "Your men did that when I would not answer to their knocks, and they stole my fowls." "Very well," replied Burgess, "where yonder red flag is flying you will find General Ian Hamilton; go and tell him your story." As the result, a staff officer sent to inspect the premises asked the Dutch dame whether food or money should be given her by way of compensation, and whether ?15 would fully cover all her loss? She seemed overwhelmingly pleased at such an offer in payment for a broken panel and a few fowls. "Very good," added the staff officer. "To-morrow I will send you ?20, but," quoth he to Burgess, "we'll make the scouts that broke the panel pay the twenty!"

In spite of all the real and the imaginary horrors recorded in "War against War," this has been the most humanely conducted struggle the world has ever seen; but would to God it were well over.

The poetry is not much; but the peace of mind which could pencil such lines in prison is a great deal!

The two best buildings in Brandfort appeared to be the church and manse belonging to the Dutch Reformed Community. The church seats 600, though the town contains only 300 whites. But then the worshippers come from near and far. Hence I found here, as at Bloemfontein that the farmers have their "church houses"--whole rows of them in the latter town--where with their families they reside from Saturday to Monday, especially on festival occasions, that they may be present at all the services of the Sabbath and the sanctuary. A typical Dutchman is nothing if he is not devout; though unfortunately his devoutness does not prevent his being exceeding "slim," which seems to some the crown of all excellencies.

The young and intelligent pastor of this important country congregation on whom I called, was evidently an ardent patriot, like almost all his cloth. He had unfortunately firmly persuaded himself that the British fist had been thrust menacingly near the Orange Free State nose; and that therefore the owner of that aforesaid nose was perfectly justified in being the first to strike a deadly blow. He told me he had been for a month at Magersfontein, and that he was out on the Brandfort hills the day before I called watching our troops fighting their way towards the town. I understood him to say he had been shooting buck. What kind of buck is quite another question. Whether as a pastor his patriotism had confined itself to the use of Bunyan's favourite weapon, "all-prayer," on our approach; or whether as a burgher he had deemed it a part of his duty to employ smokeless powder to emphasise his patriotism, I was too polite to ask. But he pointed out to me on his verandah two old and useless sporting guns, which the day before he had handed to some of our officers, by whom they had been snapped in two and left lying on the floor. There they were pointed out to me by their late owner as part of the ravages of war. They were the only weapons he had in the house, he said, when he surrendered them.

It was a very common trick on the part of surrendered burghers who took the oath of neutrality and gave up their arms, to hand in weapons that were thus worthless and to hide for future use what were of any value. We did not even attempt to take possession of any such a burgher's horse. We found him a soldier, and when he surrendered we left him a soldier, well horsed, well armed, and often deadlier as a pretended friend than as a professed foe. Because of that exquisite folly, which we misnamed "clemency," we have had to traverse the whole ground twice over, and found a guerilla war treading close on the heels of the great war.

This young predikant with more of prudence, and perchance more of honour, recollected next morning that though, as he had truly said, he had no more weapons in the house, he had a beautiful mauser carbine hidden in his garden. There it got on his nerves and perhaps on his conscience; so calling in a passing officer of the Grenadier Guards he requested him to take possession of it, together with a hundred rounds of ammunition belonging to it. When with a sad smile he pointed out to me "the ravages of war" on his verandah floor my politeness again came to the rescue, and I said nothing about that lovely little mauser of his, which an hour before I had been curiously examining at our mess breakfast table. Too much frankness on that point would perhaps have spoiled our pleasant chat.

In the course of that chat he candidly confessed himself to be thoroughly anti-British; and for his candour this young predikant is to be honoured; but some few of his ministerial brethren proved near akin to the ever-famous Vicar of Bray, whom an ancient song represents as saying:

"That this is law I will maintain Unto my dying day, Sir; That whatsoever king may reign, I'll be Vicar of Bray, Sir."

So were there Dutch predikants who were decidedly anti-British while the British were over the hills and far away; but who fell in love with the Union Jack the moment it arrived; even if they did not set it fluttering from their own chimney-top. One such our chaplain with the Australian Bushmen met at Zeerust. When the Bushmen arrived this predikant was one of the first to welcome them, and helped to hoist the British flag. Then "the Roineks," that is the "red neck" English, retired for a while, and De La Rey arrived; whereupon the resident Boers went wild with joy, and whistled and shouted one of their favourite songs, "Vat jougoed entrek," which means "Pack your traps and trek." That was a broad hint to all pro-Britishers. So this interesting predikant hauled down the Union Jack, which his sons instantly tore to tatters, ran up the Boer flag, and drove De La Rey hither and thither in his own private carriage. Though to our Australian chaplain he expressed, still later on, his deep regret that "the Hollanders had forced the President into making war on England," when Lord Methuen, in the strange whirligig of war, next drove out De La Rey from this same Zeerust, our versatile predikant's turn soon came to "Pack his traps and trek." Even in South Africa "Ye cannot serve two masters."

After one day's rest at Brandfort the Guards resumed their march, and aided by some fighting, in which the Australians took a conspicuous part, we reached the Vet River, and encamped near its southern banks for the night. Here the newly-appointed Wesleyan Welsh chaplain, Rev. Frank Edwards, overtook me; and until it could be decided where he was to go or what he was to do, he was invited to become my brother-guest at the Grenadiers' mess.

The next day being Sunday Mr Edwards had a speedy opportunity of learning how little the best intentioned chaplain can accomplish when at the front in actual war time. It was the sixth Sunday in succession I was doomed to spend, not in doing the work of a preacher but of a pedestrian. All other chaplains were often in the same sad but inevitable plight; and though Mr Edwards had come from far of set purpose to preach Christ in the Welsh tongue to Welshmen, had all the camp been Welsh he would that day have found himself absolutely helpless. We were all on the march; and the only type of Christian work then attemptable takes the form of a brief greeting in the name of Christ to the men who tramp beside us, though they are often too tired even to talk, and we are compelled to trudge on in stolid silence.

The drift we had to cross that Sunday at the Vet was by far the worst we had yet reached in South Africa, and till all the waggons were safely over, the whole column was compelled to linger hard by. I therefore took advantage of that long pause to hurry on to Smaldeel Junction, where the headquarter staff was staying for the day. Here I was privileged to introduce Mr Edwards to the Field-Marshal, and was so fortunate as to secure his immediate appointment as Wesleyan chaplain to the whole of General Tucker's Division, with special attachment to the South Wales Borderers. This important and appropriate task successfully accomplished, I retired to rest under the broken fans of a shattered windmill.

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