s of the sick very little. But here you come to
individuals, and the matter craves careful handling.

It is no fun fighting for you people at home, because you don't know
when to clap. The English papers' account of Prinsloo's surrender have
just come in. By Jupiter, for all the notice you take of it, it might be
the capture of a Boer picket and a dozen men. Here have we been marching
and fighting and freezing and sweating and climbing up great Alpine
mountains in the snow for weeks, and captured 4000 great ugly live Boers
and all their guns and baggage, and by the god of war, you hardly take
the trouble to say thank you. This sort of thing will just suit Hunter,
because his idea of bliss is to do the work and run the risk, and then
somehow to evade the praise. But he ought not to be allowed to evade it.
It is true we had no war correspondents with us, but I should have
thought the bare facts would have spoken for themselves. It was the
first thing of the war and our one really big score off the Boers.
However, I shall not discuss it any more. I am disgusted with you.
Mafeking day is about your form.

LETTER XXIV

FIGHTING AND FARM-BURNING

Frankfort, _November 23_, 1900.

Frankfort is one of our small garrison towns. It exists in a perpetual
state of siege, like Heilbron, Lindley, Ladybrand, Winberg, Bethlehem,
and a dozen others in this neighbourhood; in fact, like all the towns
held by us not on the railway. At intervals of a month or two a column
comes along bringing supplies and news from the outside world; mails,
papers, parcels, clothes and kit, great quantities of regular rations,
ammunition, &c., &c. You can imagine how eagerly the little garrison,
stranded for months in this aching desolation, looks for the column's
coming. Then arise other questions. Sometimes a part of the garrison is
relieved and receives orders to join the column, while some of the
troops forming the column are left behind in their place. Of course
every one in the town is longing to get away, and every one in the
column is dreading having to stay, and there is an interval of ghastly
expectation while contradictory rumours go hurtling from village to camp
and back again; and men look at each other like cannibals, every one
hoping the doom will fall on some one else. We in our corps are spared
all this anxiety, and can lie on our backs and look on and condole with
the unlucky ones. We never get left anywhere.

For the last fe