ffered. The Boers in rear picked up the range with great
accuracy.

And then--and then again, that cursed white flag!

It is some sneaking consolation that for a long time the soldiers
refused to heed it. Careless now of life, they were sitting up well
behind their breastworks, altering their sights, aiming coolly by the
half-minute together. At the nadir of their humiliation they could still
sting--as that new-come Boer found who, desiring one Englishman to his
bag before the end, thrust up his incautious head to see where they
were, and got a bullet through it. Some of them said they lost their
whole firing-line; others no more than nine killed and sixteen wounded.

But what matters it whether they lost one or one million? The cursed
white flag was up again over a British force in South Africa. The best
part of a thousand British soldiers, with all their arms and equipment
and four mountain guns, were captured by the enemy. The Boers had their
revenge for Dundee and Elandslaagte in war; now they took it, full
measure, in kindness. As Atkins had tended their wounded and succoured
their prisoners there, so they tended and succoured him here. One
commandant wished to send the wounded to Pretoria; the others, more
prudent as well as more humane, decided to send them back into
Ladysmith. They gave the whole men the water out of their own bottles;
they gave the wounded the blankets off their own saddles and slept
themselves on the naked veldt. They were short of transport, and they
were mostly armed with Martinis; yet they gave captured mules for the
hospital panniers and captured Lee-Metfords for splints. A man was
rubbing a hot sore on his head with a half-crown; nobody offered to take
it from him. Some of them asked soldiers for their embroidered
waist-belts as mementoes of the day. "It's got my money in it," replied
Tommy--a little surly, small wonder--and the captor said no more.

Then they set to singing doleful hymns of praise under trees. Apparently
they were not especially elated. They believed that Sir George White was
a prisoner, and that we were flying in rout from Ladysmith. They said
that they had Rhodes shut up in Kimberley, and would hang him when they
caught him. That on their side--and on ours? We fought them all that
morning in a fight that for the moment may wait. At the end, when the
tardy truth could be withheld no more--what shame! What bitter shame for
all the camp! All ashamed for England! Not of