I spent next day ashore, with the Mount Nelson Hotel as my head-quarters. It was full of a strange medley of wounded officers, adventuresses and cosmopolitans. Kitchener came down and cleared it out shortly afterwards, for the syrens were interfering with his fighting men. The general war news was very good. Paardeburg had been fought, Lord Roberts had made his way to Bloemfontein and Kimberley had been relieved by French, whose immediate return to head off Cronje was one of the inspired incidents of the war. It was a consolation to find that Boers really could be captured in large numbers, for their long run of successes while the conditions were in their favour was getting badly upon the public nerves and a legendary sort of atmosphere was beginning to build up around them.
Some money had been given me for charitable purposes when I was in London, so I went down to the camp of the Boer prisoners to see if I could spend some of it. It was a racecourse, pent in with barbed wire, and they were certainly a shaggy, dirty, unkempt crowd but with the bearing of free men. There were a few cruel or brutal faces, some of them half caste, but most were good honest fellows and the general effect was formidable. There were some who were maned like lions. I afterwards went into the tents of the sick Boers. Several were sitting sullenly round and one was raving in delirium, saying something in his frenzy which set all the others laughing in a mirthless way. One man sat in a corner with a proud dark face and brooding eagle eyes. He bowed with grave courtesy when I put down some money for cigarettes. A Huguenot, or I am mistaken.
We had been waiting for orders and now we suddenly left Capetown on March 26, reaching East London on the 28th. There we disembarked, and I was surprised to find Leo Trevor, of amateur theatrical fame, acting as transport officer. In spite of his efforts (I hope it was not through them) our hospital stuff was divided between two trains, and when we reached Bloemfontein after days of travel we found that the other half had wandered off and was engulfed in the general chaos. There were nights of that journey which I shall never forget—the great train roaring through the darkness, the fires beside the line, the dark groups silhouetted against the flames, the shouts of “Who are you?” and the crash of voices as our mates cried back, “The Camerons,” for this famous regiment was our companion. Wonderful is the atmosphere of war. When the millennium comes the world will gain much, but it will lose its greatest thrill.
It is a strange wild place, the veldt, with its vast green plains and peculiar flat-topped hills, relics of some extraordinary geological episode. It is poor pasture—a sheep to two acres—so it must always be sparsely inhabited. Little white farms, each with its eucalyptus grove and its dam, were scattered over it. When we crossed the Free State border by a makeshift bridge, beside the ruins of the old one, we noticed that many of these little houses were flying the white flag. Every one seemed very good-humoured, burghers and soldiers alike, but the guerilla war afterwards altered all that.
It was April 2, and 5 a.m. when we at last reached the capital of the Free State, and were dumped down outside the town in a great green expanse covered with all sorts of encampments and animals. There was said to be a large force of Boers close to the town, and they had cut up one of our columns a few days before at Sanna’s Post. Some troops were moving out, so I, with Gwynne whom I had known in Egypt, and that great sportsman, Claude de Crespigny, set forth to see what we could, an artilleryman lending me his led horse. There was nothing doing, however, for it was Brother Boer’s way never to come when you wanted him and always when you didn’t. Save for good company, I got nothing out of a long hot day.
Good company is always one of the solaces of a campaign. I ran across many old friends, some soldiers, some medicos, some journalists. Knight of the “Falcon” had, alas, been hit in an early battle and was in hospital. Julian Ralph, a veteran American correspondent, Bennett Burleigh the rugged old war horse, queer little Melton Prior who looked like the prim headmaster of a conventional school, dark-eyed Donohue of the “Chronicle,” Paterson the Australian, of Snowy River fame, they were a wonderful set of men. I had little time to enjoy their society, however, for among the miles of loaded trucks which lay at the endless sidings I had to my great joy discovered the missing half of our equipment and guided a fatigue party down to it. All day we laboured and before evening our beds were up and our hospital ready for duty. Two days later wagons of sick and wounded began to disgorge at our doors and the real work had begun.
STAFF OF THE LANGMAN HOSPITAL,
SOUTH AFRICA, 1900.
We had been given the cricket field as our camp and the fine pavilion as our chief ward. Others were soon erected, for we had plenty of tents—one each for our own use and a marquee for the mess. We were ready for any moderate strain, but that which was put upon us was altogether beyond our strength and for a month we had a rather awful time. The first intimation of trouble came to me in a simple and dramatic way. We had a bath in the pavilion and I had gone up to it and turned the tap, but not a drop of water appeared, though it had been running freely the night before. This small incident was the first intimation that the Boers had cut the water supply of the town, which caused us to fall back upon the old wells, which in turn gave rise to an outbreak of enteric which cost us 5,000 lives. The one great blot in Lord Roberts’ otherwise splendid handling of the campaign was, in my opinion, that he did not buzz out at once with every man he could raise, and relieve the water works, which were only 20 miles away. Instead of this he waited for his army to recuperate, and so exposed them to the epidemic. However, it is always easy to be wise after the event.
The outbreak was a terrible one. It was softened down for public consumption and the press messages were heavily censored, but we lived in the midst of death—and death in its vilest, filthiest form. Our accommodation was for fifty patients, but 120 were precipitated upon us, and the floor was littered between the beds with sick and often dying men. Our linen and utensils were never calculated for such a number, and as the nature of the disease causes constant pollution, and this pollution of the most dangerous character and with the vilest effluvia, one can imagine how dreadful was the situation. The worst surgical ward after a battle would be a clean place compared to that pavilion. At one end was a stage with the scene set for “H.M.S. Pinafore.” This was turned into latrines for those who could stagger so far. The rest did the best they could, and we did the best we could in turn. But a Verestschagin would have found a subject in that awful ward, with the rows of emaciated men, and the silly childish stage looking down upon it all. In the very worst of it two nursing sisters appeared among us, and never shall I forget what angels of light they appeared, or how they nursed those poor boys, swaddling them like babies and meeting every want with gentle courage. Thank God, they both came through safe.