lready been
made. A fourth, the Rev. Owen Spencer Watkins, represented the
Wesleyan Church in the Omdurman Campaign and was officially present at
the memorial service for General Gordon; but in this campaign he was
unfortunately shut up in Ladysmith, so that we never met. His story
however has been separately told in "Chaplains at the Front." There
remain three whom I repeatedly saw, and who reported to me from time
to time the progress of their work--viz. the Revs. M. F. Crewdson, T.
H. Wainman, and W. C. Burgess, each of whom in few words it will now
be my privilege to introduce.

[Sidenote: _A Chaplain who found the Base became the Front._]

Mr Crewdson, who had for some years been my colleague in England, at
the commencement of the war was compelled to leave Johannesburg, and
became a refugee minister at the Cape, where on my arrival he was one
of the first to welcome me. Possessed of brilliant preaching abilities
and uncontrollably active, a life of semi-indolence soon became to him
unendurable; and presently his offer was accepted of service with the
troops, but instead of being sent as he desired into the thickest of
the fray, he found himself detailed for hospital and other homely
duties, at De-Aar Nauwpoort and Norval's Pont. Here for over twelve
months he rendered admirable, though to him monotonous, service; when,
lo, suddenly the Boers doubled back upon their pursuers, and attempted
not unsuccessfully though unfruitfully, a second invasion of Cape
Colony. The base became the front, and this vast region of hospitals
and supply depots became the scene of very active operations indeed,
in which the Guards' Brigade, now recalled from Koomati Poort, took a
prominent part. Mr Crewdson found himself at last not where wounds are
healed merely, but where wounds are made, and for the moment, being
intensely pro-British, found in that fact a kind of grim content.

[Sidenote: _Pathetic scenes in Hospital._]

Few chaplains in the course of this campaign have had so extensive an
experience in hospital work as Mr Crewdson, and in the course of his
correspondence he relates many pathetic incidents that came under his
own personal observation. At De-Aar he found a lance-corporal with a
fractured jaw and some twenty other slight or serious wounds, all
caused by fragments of a single shell. "I was one of seven," he said,
"entrenched in a little sangar on a hill. Hundreds of Boers and Blacks
came up against us. One of the s