uelty to the
victors. So in Bloemfontein healthy civilians, whether foes or
friends, slept on feather beds, while suffering and delirious soldiers
were stretched on an earthen floor that was sodden with almost
incessant rain. Neither for that rain can the army doctors be held
responsible, though it almost drove them to despair. Nor was it their
fault that the Boers were allowed at this very time to capture the
Bloemfontein waterworks, and shatter them. Bad water at Paardeberg
caused the epidemic. Bad water at Bloemfontein brought it to a climax.
In this little city of the sick the medical men had at one time a
constant average of 1800 sufferers on their hands; mostly cases of
enteric which, as truly as shot and shell, shows no respect of
persons. Not only our fighting-men--soldiers of high degree and low
degree alike--but non-combatants, chaplains, army scripture readers,
war correspondents, doctors, and army nurses, it remorselessly claimed
and victimised. In such a campaign the fighting line is not the chief
point of peril, nor the fighting soldiers the only sufferers. Hospital
work has its heroes, though not its trumpeters, and many a man of the
Royal Army Medical Corps has as faithfully won his medal as any that
handled rifle.

[Sidenote: _All hands and houses to the rescue._]

Our "Kopje-Book Maxims" told us that "two horses are enough to shift a
camp--provided they are dead enough." Either the camp or the horses
must be quickly shifted if pestilence is to be kept at bay; yet in
spite of all shiftings, of all sanitary searchings and strivings, the
fever refused to shift; the field hospitals were from the first
hopelessly crowded out; and the city of death would quickly have
become the city of despair, but for the timely arrival of sundry
irregular helpers and organisations that had been lavishly equipped
and sent out by private beneficence. Such was the huge Portman
Hospital. In the Ramblers' Club and Grounds, the Longman Hospital was
housed; and here I found Conan Doyle practising the healing art with
presumably a skill rivalling that with which he penned his superb
detective tales. In the forsaken barracks of the Orange Free State
soldiery, the Sydney doctors established their house of healing,
assisted by ambulance men and ambulance appliances unsurpassed by
anything of the kind employed in any other part of Africa. Australia,
like her sister colonies, sent to us her best; and bravely they bore
themselves bes