By nursing our sick soldiers through.
XLIV
General Hospital, Natal,
April 1901.
Our tent has filled up now—four of us in it—so we feel rather tightly packed. One of the four is a sister who has been in India, and done some camping out, so she thinks she knows all about tents and how to live in them; we rather trade on this, and when it rains we assure her she ought to go round and slack the guy-ropes in case they should shrink with the wet and pull the pegs up, as she knows so much more about how to do it than we do; or if it comes on to blow in the night we wake her up, and offer her the hammer to go round and knock in the tent-pegs!
The wind gets up so suddenly here that we have to be careful not to leave anything about that is not tethered, or it may be miles away over the veldt before we wake up.
I now have charge of a medical line of tents, and find the work very interesting, though there are many difficulties to contend with.
The Boers seem very thick in the country round; they have captured a train with 250 horses between here and H., and the other day they took 600 head of cattle from a loyal farmer only about six miles from here, and he had to fly for protection.
Some Dragoons, who have been scouring the country for some weeks, were through here the other day, and one of their poor horses fell, exhausted, near to my tent; after a rest they got him up and went on, but soon a sergeant returned to say that he had fallen again, and they were going to shoot him, could he borrow some mules and tackle to pull his body off the path? I said, "Oh, don't shoot him—I badly want a horse, and I'll get him some gruel and brandy from the store." He said I might have him if I would look after him, or else get him shot; but when we went out we found the men had already shot the poor beast.