will throb in unison with his, for their
strong hands on that May Day helped him to win what he is so fat to wear;
and when our Sovereign honours him she honours them, and well they know it.
And when the years have rolled away, and they are old and grey, and spent
with wounds and toil, fit for nothing but to dandle little grand-babes on
their knees, young men and maids will flock around, and pointing out the
veteran to the curious stranger say, with honest pride, "He was with Towse
the day he won the cross."

THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.

There are hundreds of men lying in unmarked graves in African soil to-day
who ought to be alive and well, others who have been done to death by the
crass ignorance, the appalling stupidity, the damnable conceit which will
brook no teaching. I have seen men die like dogs, men who left comfortable
homes in the old land to go forth to uphold the power and prestige of our
nation's flag. I have seen them gasping out their lives like stricken
sheep, just in the springtide of their manhood, when the glory and the lust
of life should have been strong upon them I have watched the Irish lad with
the down upon his brave boyish face pass with the last deep-drawn quivering
sob over the border line of life, into the shadows of the unsearchable
beyond, a wasted sacrifice upon the grim altar of incapacity. I have seen
the kilted Scottish laddie lie, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, waiting
for the whisper of the wings of the Angel of Death. I have seen the death
damp gather on his unlined brow, and watched the grey pallor creep upwards
from throat to temple; until my very soul, wrung with anguish unutterable,
has risen in hot revolt against the crimes of the incapable.

I have knelt by England's fair-faced sons, the child of the cities, the boy
from the fens, the youth from the farm, and watched the shadows creeping
over eyes that mothers loved to look upon. I have seen the wasted fingers,
grown clawlike, plucking aimlessly at the rude blankets as if weaving the
woof of the winding-sheet, and have listened with aching heart to the
aimless babbling of the dying, in which home and friends were blended,
until the tired voice, grown aweary with the weight of utterance, died out
like the crooning of a lisping child, as the soul slipped through the
golden gateway that leads to the glory beyond the