l 4th, and among those taken
captive by De Wet was the Wesleyan chaplain. His horse, his kit, and
all his belongings at the same time changed hands, and though he was
solemnly assured all would be restored to him, that promise still
awaits redemption.

[Sidenote: _Caring for the Wounded._]

Mr Burgess, though stripped of all he possessed, except what he wore,
received De Wet's permission to search for the wounded as well as to
bury the dead; and in one of his letters to me he tells of one
mortally wounded whom he thus found, and who, in reply to the query,
"Do you know Jesus?" replied, "I'm trusting Jesus as my Saviour"; then
recognising Mr Burgess as his chaplain, he added, "Pray for me!" so,
amid onlooking stretcher-bearers and mounted Boers, the dying lad was
commended to the eternal keeping of his Saviour. It is this element
which has introduced itself into modern warfare which will presently
make war impossible, except between wild beasts or wilder savages.
Prayer on the battlefield, and the use on the same spot of explosive
bullets, is too incongruous to have in it the element of perpetuity.

The number of soldiers that thus die praying, or being prayed for, may
be comparatively small; but even the unsaintly soldier, when wounded,
often displays a stoicism that has in it an undertone of Christian
endurance. A lad of the Connaughts at Colenso, whom a bullet had
horribly crippled in both legs, shouted with defiant cheerfulness to
his comrades--"Bring me a tin whistle and I will play you any tune you
like"; and a naval athlete at Ladysmith, when a shell carried away one
of his legs and his other foot, simply sighed, "There's an end of my
cricket." Pious readers would doubtless in all such cases much prefer
some pious reference to Christ and His Cross in place of the tin
whistle and cricket; but even here is evidence of the grit that has
helped to make England great, and it by no means follows that saving
grace also is not there. The most vigorous piety is not always the
most vocal.

After nearly four and twenty hours of terrific pelting by shot and
shell, Mr Burgess tells me our total loss was only ten killed and
thirty-five wounded. Not one in ten was hit; and so again was
illustrated the comparative harmlessness of either Mauser or
machine-gun fire against men fairly well sheltered. This war thus
witnessed a strange anomaly. It used the deadliest of all weapons,
and produced with them a percentage of deaths un