r famous
battles, and in our recent march, just saw this goal of all our hopes
and died. The fatal symptoms were evidently of a specially alarming
type, for he was hastily buried with all his belongings, his slippers,
his iron mug, his boots, his haversack, and the very stretcher on
which he lay; then over all was poured some potent disinfectant. It
was a gruesome sight! So to-day he lies in the self-same cemetery
where rests many a British soldier who fell not far away in the fights
of fifty years ago. It was British soil in those distant days, and is
British soil again, but at how great cost we were now about to learn.

That guardsman was the first fruits of a vast ingathering. In the
course of the next few weeks over 6000 cases of enteric sprang up in
the immediate neighbourhood of that one little town; and 1300 of its
victims were presently laid in that same cemetery, which now holds so
much of the empire's best, and towards which so many a mother-heart
turns tearfully from almost every part of the Anglo-Saxon world. It
was the after-math of Paardeberg, which claimed more lives long after,
than in all its hours of slowly intensifying agony! Boers and
Britons, both together, there were vastly fewer who sighed their last
beside the Modder River banks than the sequent fever claimed at
Bloemfontein; and all through the campaign the loss of life caused by
sickness has been so much larger than through wounds as to justify the
soldiers' favourite dictum respecting it: "Better three hits than one
enteric."

Such an epidemic, laying hold as it did in the course of a few weeks
of one in five of all the troops within reach of Bloemfontein, is
quite unexampled in the history of recent wars; and the Royal Army
Medical Corps can scarcely be censured for being unable to adequately
cope with it. They were 900 miles from their base, with only a broken
railway by which to bring up supplies. The little town, already so
severely commandeered by the Boers, could furnish next to nothing in
the way of medical comforts or necessities. Every available bed, or
blanket, or bit of sheeting, was bought up by the authorities; but if
every private bedroom in the place had been ransacked, the
requirements of the case even then could scarcely have been met.
Possibly that ought to have been done, but all through this campaign
our army rulers have been excessively tender-handed in such matters;
forgetting that clemency to the vanquished is often cr