ome with birdseye, but all of the
same type, hard, rugged, and alert. The man who could look at these
splendid soldiers, and, remembering the sacrifices of time, money,
and comfort which most of them had made before they found themselves
fighting in the heart of Africa, doubt that the spirit of the race
burned now as brightly as ever, must be devoid of judgment and sympathy.
The real glories of the British race lie in the future, not in the past.
The Empire walks, and may still walk, with an uncertain step, but with
every year its tread will be firmer, for its weakness is that of waxing
youth and not of waning age.

The greatest misfortune of the campaign, one which it was obviously
impolitic to insist upon at the time, began with the occupation of
Bloemfontein. This was the great outbreak of enteric among the troops.
For more than two months the hospitals were choked with sick. One
general hospital with five hundred beds held seventeen hundred sick,
nearly all enterics. A half field hospital with fifty beds held three
hundred and seventy cases. The total number of cases could not have
been less than six or seven thousand--and this not of an evanescent and
easily treated complaint, but of the most persistent and debilitating
of continued fevers, the one too which requires the most assiduous
attention and careful nursing. How great was the strain only those who
had to meet it can tell. The exertions of the military hospitals and
of those others which were fitted out by private benevolence sufficed,
after a long struggle, to meet the crisis. At Bloemfontein alone, as
many as fifty men died in one day, and more than 1000 new graves in the
cemetery testify to the severity of the epidemic. No men in the campaign
served their country more truly than the officers and men of the medical
service, nor can any one who went through the epidemic forget the
bravery and unselfishness of those admirable nursing sisters who set the
men around them a higher standard of devotion to duty.

Enteric fever is always endemic in the country, and especially at
Bloemfontein, but there can be no doubt that this severe outbreak had
its origin in the Paardeberg water. All through the campaign, while the
machinery for curing disease was excellent, that for preventing it was
elementary or absent. If bad water can cost us more than all the bullets
of the enemy, then surely it is worth our while to make the drinking
of unboiled water a stringent milita