ooting and the loss of your brother hurts you less than a week
before did a thorn in your dog's foot. But it is only compassion for the
dead that dries up; and as it dries, the spring wells up among good men
of sympathy with all the living. A few men had made a fire in the
gnawing damp and cold, and round it they sat, even the unwounded Boer
prisoners. For themselves they took the outer ring, and not a word did
any man say that could mortify the wound of defeat. In the afternoon
Tommy was a hero, in the evening he was a gentleman.

Do not forget, either, the doctors of the enemy. We found their wounded
with our own, and it was pardonable to be glad that whereas our men set
their teeth in silence, some of theirs wept and groaned. Not all,
though: we found Mr Kok, father of the Boer general and member of the
Transvaal Executive, lying high up on the hill--a massive, white-bearded
patriarch, in a black frock-coat and trousers. With simple dignity,
with the right of a dying man to command, he said in his strong voice,
"Take me down the hill and lay me in a tent; I am wounded by three
bullets." It was a bad day for the Kok family: four were on the field,
and all were hit. They found Commandant Schiel, too, the German
free-lance, lying with a bullet through his thigh, near the two guns
which he had served so well, and which no German or Dutchman would ever
serve again. Then there were three field-cornets out of four, members of
Volksraad, two public prosecutors--Heaven only knows whom! But their own
doctors were among them almost as soon as were ours.

Under the Red Cross--under the black sky, too, and the drizzle, and the
creeping cold--we stood and kicked numbed feet in the mud, and talked
together of the fight. A prisoner or two, allowed out to look for
wounded, came and joined in. We were all most friendly, and naturally
congratulated each other on having done so well. These Boers were
neither sullen nor complaisant. They had fought their best, and lost;
they were neither ashamed nor angry. They were manly and courteous, and
through their untrimmed beards and rough corduroys a voice said very
plainly, "Ruling race." These Boers might be brutal, might be
treacherous; but they held their heads like gentlemen. Tommy and the
veldt peasant--a comedy of good manners in wet and cold and mud and
blood!

And so the long, long night wore on. At midnight came outlandish Indians
staggering under the green-curtained palanquins they