It is undeniable that the child mortality in these refugee camps has been high compared with the average that prevails in a healthy English town. But the South African average, especially during the fever season, usually reaches quite another figure. A Hollander predikant, whom I found among our prisoners, told me that he, his wife, and his three children were all down with fever, but were without physic, and almost without food, when the English found them in the low country beyond Pietersburg, and brought them into camp. Nearly all their neighbours were in the same sad plight, and several died before they could be moved. In that and similar cases the camp mortality was bound to be high, but it takes a free-tongued Britisher to assert that it was the fault of the ever brutal British. In some camps there was an epidemic of measles, which occasionally occurs even in the happy homeland; but in the least sanitary refugee camp the mortality was never so high as in some of our own military fever camps, where the epidemic raged like a plague, and for many a weary week refused to be stayed. It should be remembered also that all the healthy manhood of the country was either still out on commando or in the oversea camps provided for our prisoners of war. The men brought in as refugees were only those who had no fight left in them—the halt, the maimed, the blind, the sick of every sort, the bent by extreme old age, the dying. I was startled by the specimens I saw. Here were gathered all the frailnesses and infirmities of two Republics; and to test an improvised camp of such a class by the standards which we rightly apply to an average English town is as misleading as it is mischievous.
The Grit of the Guards.
When voyaging on The Nubia with the Scots Guards they often laughingly assured me it was the merest "walk over" that awaited us, and so in due time we discovered it to be. But it was a walk over well nigh the whole of South Africa, especially for these Scots. While during the second year of the war the Grenadiers were doing excellent work, chiefly in the northern part of Cape Colony, and the Coldstreams were similarly employed mainly along the lines of communication in the Orange River Colony, the Scots Guards trekked north, south, east and west. As a mere matter of mileage but much more as a matter of endurance they broke all previous records.
I have more than once written so warmly in praise of the daring and endurance of these men as to make me fear my words might for that very reason be heavily discounted. I was therefore delighted to find in Julian Ralph's "At Pretoria" a kindred eulogy: "When I passed through the camps of the Grenadiers, Scots, and Coldstream Guards the other day, I thought I never saw men more wretchedly and pitifully circumstanced. The officers are the drawing-room pets of London society, which in large measure they rule.... Well, there they were on the veldt looking like a lot of half drowned rats, as indeed they had been ever since the cold season and the rains had set in. You would not like to see a vagabond dog fare as they were doing. They had no tents. They could get no dry wood to make fires with. They were soaked to the bone night and day, and they stood about in mud toe-deep. Titled and untitled alike all were in the same scrape, and all were stoutly insisting that it didn't matter; it was all in the game."
The Irregulars.
During this second period of the war the staying powers of the Irregulars was no less severely tested. Here and there there was a momentary failure, but as a whole the men did superbly. Multitudes of the Colonials, who on completing their first term of service, returned to Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, actually re-enlisted for a second term, and in several cases paid their own passage to the Cape in order to rejoin. The Colonials are incomparably keener Imperialists than we ourselves claim to be. Some of the officers of these Irregular troops were themselves of a most irregular type, and in the case of town, or mine, or cattle, Guards were occasionally chosen, not with reference to any martial fitness they might possess, but because of their knowledge of and influence over the men they now commanded, and previously in civilian life had probably employed. One of these called his men to "fall in—two thick!" and another, when he wanted to halt his Guards, is reported to have thrown up his arms and said, "Whoa! Stop!" None need wonder if troops so handled sometimes found themselves in a tight corner. Yet of these newly recruited Irregulars, as of the most staid Reservists, there was good reason to be proud; and as concerning his own Irregulars in the Peninsular War Wellington said that with them he could go anywhere or do anything, so were these also as a whole entitled to similar confidence and to a similar tribute.
The Testimony of the Cemetery.
How fully these citizen soldiers hazarded their lives for the empire every cemetery in South Africa bears sad and silent witness, including the one I know so well in Pretoria. Indeed that particular burial-place is to me the most pathetic spot on earth, and enshrines in striking fashion the whole history of the Transvaal, whereof only one or two illustrations can here be given. In a tiny walled enclosure—a cemetery within a cemetery—filled with the soldier victims of our earlier wars, I found a slab whereon was this inscription:—
"To the memory of Corporal Henry Watson,
Who died at Pretoria 17th May 1877; aged 25 years.
He was the first British Soldier to give up his
life in the service of his Country, on the annexation
of the Transvaal Republic!"
Near by on another slab I read:—