Impressions of a War Correspondent | Page 8

he still wears in his cap, often give him enough to get
drunk on. The man who loses his sight from the earth-scattering shell
can at worst carry a label to tell that he was blinded in the war, and his
charitable fellow-countrymen will give him enough to keep him
enjoying life through the channels of the four other senses, and he will
still admit that it is good to be alive. Blindness is bad, but war deals
worse blows than in the eyes. It deals blows under which the reason
itself staggers and is maimed. The lunatic asylum is worse than the
hospital. We are carrying back nine men who have lost their reason at
Magersfontein and other battles; two have been mercifully treated and
have lost it completely--the padded cell must mean a certain
unconsciousness; but the greatest, deepest pity of which the human
heart is capable is called forth by those who are maimed in mind. Long
lucid intervals of perfect sanity give them time to learn the meaning of
the locks and bars. "Yes, I know; I went off my head after
Magersfontein," one poor fellow tells you; another repeatedly asks,
"Will they put me into an asylum when I go home?" What a
home-coming! Sure enough it is to the asylum they are going. They
will be lost to what friends or relatives they have in that oblivion of a
living grave. When their comrades return, not the faintest echo of the
cheering will reach their cells. Men do not like to talk of madness; they
will point with pride and pity to chums and comrades bearing
honourable wounds, but these poor wretches will just disappear, lost in
the great aftermath of war. We still have the expressions "frightened
out of his senses" or "frightened out of his wits," and here are instances
of its actually occurring, the strain on nerves being more than the brains
of these men could stand. Is it that their nervous organisation has
become more highly strung and bears the strain less sturdily than in
times past, or that there is for some minds a hidden terror in the
sightless, invisible death that whistles over them as they lie
belly-pressing the earth in the face of an unseeable foe? It is not
inconceivable that this may have an effect like some horrible nightmare

amid all the glare of daylight on some minds. The man is held there in
terror by the worse terror of running away; a comrade on his right
grows callous by waiting, and to relieve the wants of nature raises
himself up and gets hit; the thirst of another overcomes him, and he
runs to fill his water-bottle and falls; and all day long, through heat and
hunger and thirst, he is held there in a vice of increasing terror, like a
child left in the dark denied the language of a cry. It takes strong nerves
to stand that strain, we all must admit who have any personal
knowledge of what it means; and what a gathering up of the reins of
self-control we often experience! What wonder, then, that weak nerves
cannot stand it, but sometimes break down under the strain? Such a
collapse has a way of being regarded as the uttermost sign of abject
cowardice, which by no means follows--nervous men are frequently the
bravest of the brave. The refinement of modern shooting-irons seems to
call for a certain corresponding refinement of courage--the cold,
steel-like courage that can stand and wait, and win by the waiting of
their stand.

III
ELANDSLAAGTE
Up before daybreak, but still not early enough, as the Imperial Light
Horse and a battery of Natal Artillery had already gone towards
Elandslaagte, about sixteen miles from here, at three o'clock.
It was bitterly cold when we started, and for a couple of hours of our
journey. About half a mile beyond Modder's Spruit Station we met a
man walking along the road in his socks, carrying a pair of heavy boots.
He told us he had just escaped from the Boers, after having been, with
thirty other miners, their prisoner since Thursday last. His feet were
sore from running in the big boots, and he was nearly exhausted.
The Boers had looted the stores, station, and mining office at
Elandslaagte, and in addition had looted a lot of luggage taken in the
captured train. The evening before he had seen a drunken Boer strutting

about dressed in a suit of evening clothes belonging to an English
officer. There were a lot of low-class Boers amongst the eight hundred
there who spent riotous evenings, getting drunk on the liquor found in
the stores; but others of them seemed decent sort of farmers, and all the
prisoners were very well treated by General