p, men may be counted on for
something far greater even than bravery.

XXV

A MEMORIAL OF THE SIEGE

There is nothing pretty about the place where the dead defenders of
Mafeking are laid. It lies in a little square of brown stone wall,
planted amid the dreary waste outside the town. There are no green
lawns, no twisted yews, no weeping willows; the few fir trees hold
themselves stiffly up, as though in pride at this triumph of the
vegetable over the animal; and the great bushes of faded geranium only
throw into relief the regular lines of limestone mounds, each with its
prim wooden cross of advertisement. Always an ugly and a dreary place,
it was, when I saw it a few days after the relief, more dreary than
ever; for the sun, whose presence makes the difference of a season in
this bare land, was hidden behind dark stacks of cloud flying westward
before a cold gale.

From a sandbag protection at one corner of the cemetery there is a view
on all sides to the horizon. The town, the empty railway station, the
hospital, the network of shelter trenches, connecting earth-works,
redans, redoubts, forts, and emplacements; the straight line of
railway-ruled across the plain to the horizon--these make the view.
Hardly anything is moving except the white flag on the hospital and the
colours on the forts. Sometimes a figure crosses the open stretch
between the hospital and the town, but outside the cemetery itself
hardly a man is to be seen. The wind hums in the empty hearth of a
locomotive, through the stiff trees of the cemetery, past the signal,
standing like a sentinel gone to sleep with his head sunk on his breast,
waiting in an attitude of invitation for the train that is seven months
overdue.

One's eye returns along the shining rails until it rests again within
the yard, in a far corner of which a couple of orderlies detailed for
burial fatigue are hacking with picks at the hard, white earth. The
graves are in prim, uniform rows--the soldiers' graves, I mean, for even
here the military element swamps the civilian, and one hardly takes note
of the private graves, they are so few. But the soldiers' graves are
arranged with military precision, row behind row, each row containing
twenty graves or more. And at least seven or eight rows of graves are
marked by the regulation cross, while there are many rows on which as
yet no crosses have been erected. The painted words on the crosses
become monotonous as one reads f