Then he managed to limp back to his battalion, and piteously begged his adjutant not to let his name be put down on the casualty list, for, said he, "my mother is in feeble health, and if she saw my name in the papers among the wounded she would worry herself almost to death, as years ago when she heard of my being hit in Tirah." That brave request was granted, and he remained in the ranks marching as one unwounded.
Yet neither this Providential deliverance nor the terrors that soon followed at Modder River sufficed to lure to either prayer or praise this godless, but surely not graceless, corporal. On the 27th of August, however, which happened to be his thirtieth birthday, a devout sergeant had the joy of winning him to Christian decision; and that day, as he told me in Pretoria, he resolved to find out for himself whether after thirty years of misery the mercy of the Lord could provide for him thirty years of happiness.
No canteens and no crime.
On board the Nubia, amid piles of literature put on board for the amusement of the troops during the voyage, I discovered a quantity of pamphlets entitled "Beer Cellars and Beer Sellers," the purpose of which was to prove that the beer sellers were England's most indispensable patriots; that the beer cellars were England's best citadels; and that the beer trade in general was the very backbone of England's stability. It was horribly tantalising to the men in face of such teaching to find that there had been placed on board for them not so much as a solitary barrel of this much belauded beverage. Through all the voyage every man remained perforce a total abstainer. Yet there was not a single death among those sixteen hundred, nor a solitary instance of serious sickness. What does Burton say to that?
As at sea, so on land, the authorities seemed more afraid of the beloved beer barrel than of the bullets of the Boers; and for the most part no countersign sufficed to secure for it admittance to our camps. An occasional tot of rum was distributed among the men; but even that seemed to be rather to satisfy a sentiment than to serve any really useful purpose. At any rate, some of the men, like myself, tramped all the way to Koomati Poort, often in the worst of weather, without taking a single tot, and were none the worse for so refraining, but rather so much the better.
The effect on the character of the men was still more remarkable; and while in Pretoria I was repeatedly assured that some who had been a perpetual worry to their officers in beer-ridden England, on the beerless veldt, or in the liquorless towns of the Transvaal, speedily took rank among the most reliable men in all their regiment. To my colleague, the Rev. W. Burgess, a major of the Yorkshires, said "Nineteen-twentieths of the crime in the British army is due to drink. As a proof I have been at this outpost with 150 men for six weeks, where we have absolutely no drink, and there have been only two minor cases brought before me. There is no insubordination whatever, and if you do away with drink you have in the British army an ideal army. Whether or not men can be made sober by Act of Parliament, clearly they can by martial law!"
With the men so sober, with a field-marshal so God-fearing, the constant outrages ascribed to them by slander-loving Englishmen at home, become a moral impossibility; and to that fact, after we had been long in possession of Pretoria, the principal minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Transvaal bore ready witness in the following letter sent by him to the Military Governor of Pretoria:—
Not a single instance of criminal assault or rape by non-commissioned officers or men of the British army on Boer women has come to my knowledge. I have asked several gentlemen and their testimony is the same.... The discipline and general moral conduct of His Majesty's troops in Pretoria is, under the circumstances, better than I ever expected it would or could be. There have certainly been cases of immoral conduct, but in no single instance, so far as I know, has force been used. They only go where they are invited and where they are welcome.
(Signed) H. S. Bosman.
When such is the testimony of our adversaries, we need not hesitate to accept the similar tribute paid by Sir Redvers Buller to his army of abstainers in Natal:—"I am filled with admiration for the British soldiers," said he; "really the manner in which they have worked, fought, and endured during the last fortnight has been something more than human. Broiled in a burning sun by day, drenched in rain by night, lying but three hundred yards off an enemy, who shoots you if you show so much as a finger, they could hardly eat or drink by day; and as they were usually attacked by night, they got but little sleep; yet through it all they were as cheery and as willing as could be."