Impressions of a War Correspondent | Page 5

reach their ears, fired by an invisible foe. Their death is merely the quod erat demonstrandum of a mathematical and mechanical proposition. But with bow and arrow, spear or battle-axe, Mauser or Lee-Metford, the heart behind the weapon is just the same now as then. Probably faint hearts fail now as then, just as much--shrink to a panic that falls on them suddenly as cold mist on mountain-top; and the stout hearts wait and endure, and perhaps do more of the waiting, and have to sweat and swear and endure this waiting longer now than then before the intoxicating delight of active battle finds vent for their hearts' desire, when, under names like "duty," a monarch's voice in their souls cries "Havoc," and lets slip the old dogs of savagery lying low in every man's nature, until the veldt of this new land is manured, like the juicy battlefields of old, "with carrion men groaning for burial."

II
THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
Hot, sweating, dusty, and tired, with no inclination whatever to move out of camp, everybody would find all the indications of approaching disease every day if he were only to think of such a thing. The reading of a liver advertisement in one of the home papers would show all your symptoms, only they all would be "more so." But every one knew it was only the climate, the hard work, and sometimes the indifferent food, and so went on; but a day comes when the food becomes absolutely distasteful, when the appetite begins to go. A long day's riding on the veldt should leave one with a voracious appetite for dinner, but when one comes in and can taste nothing, and only just lies down dog-tired day after day, then he begins to think there is something wrong. The idea of going to the doctor is very distasteful, so he struggles on, hoping to work it off, until one day he comes very near a collapse, with head swimming and knees groggy, and then some comrade makes the doctor have a look at him, and his temperature is perhaps 102 to 104. In Ladysmith it was then a question of being sent out to Intombi Camp. To most men this seemed like being exiled to Siberia; but there was no help for it. Comrades said good-bye when it would have been more cheering to have said au revoir. The train left for Intombi Hospital Camp at six in the morning, carrying its load of those who had been wounded in the previous twenty-four hours, as well as the sick. It was a sad journey out; men could not help cursing their bad luck and wondering what would be before them as a result of the journey, wondering if they should ever rejoin their regiments or if their next journey would not be back to the cemetery they were now passing on their right, growing every day more ominously populous. The hospital camp at Intombi was a collection of tents and large marquees, civilian doctors attending the Volunteers and Army doctors the Regulars. There was also a considerable number of the inhabitants of Ladysmith, not alone women and children, but men. Hence the reason that it got christened Camp Funk by the inhabitants that remained in the town. Situated on the flat of the plain, on a level with the river banks, it was by no means an ideal situation for a fever hospital, but still it was a great thing to be out of the way of these irregularly dropping shells and to know one was away from them. "Long Tom," on Bulwana, shook the very ground when he fired, and, with the other guns there, often got on the nerves of many of the patients to a trying extent, and the Boers, as a rule, started firing at sunrise, just about the time when the poor devil who has tossed and turned through the long hours of the hot night in fevered restlessness now from sheer exhaustion is just sinking into sleep, to be startled by the terrific bang above his head and the rush of the shell, like the tearing of a yacht's mainsail, as it speeds on its arched course towards the devoted town.
A curious passive fight the patient settles down to, with a fatal little thermometer keeping score and marking the game--a sort of tug-of-war between doctors and Disease. The ground is marked in degrees from 98.4 to 106, the former being normal temperature, the later the point at which, as a rule, disease wins the game.
Take the case of a fellow the author knows intimately. He had held out too long without going to hospital, putting down his weakness, lassitude, and general feeling of extreme cheapness to the climate instead of the real cause, with