[5] General Botha tells me that the hat which was returned to him by Lord Kitchener had first belonged to his little son, Louis, who had written his name in full, in blue pencil, on the inside of the crown, and had given it, when he had no more use for it, to his little native orderly.
CHAPTER XXXV[ToC]
MEMORIES BITTER-SWEET
The Captain's visit was not an unmixed joy. Some bitter revelations were made, much pathos mixed with the humours of the situation and tragic experiences related by all—but on these I shall merely touch, as unavoidable and necessary for the completion of my story.
After the treachery of their own people and the arming of the natives, nothing troubled the men so much as the fact that the fighting burghers were, in some parts of the country, suffering from sore gums and showing signs of scurvy, caused by an unchanging diet of meat and mealies. The spies wanted to communicate this to some good, trustworthy doctor and to get medicine for them to take out to the commandos, but Mrs. van Warmelo told them that no medicine in the world could cure that. What they wanted was a change of diet—fresh milk, vegetables, fruit, and an abundant supply of lime-juice, etc.
Sending out lime-juice would be as absurd as impossible, for it would be as a drop in the ocean of want—and as it was, the men were handicapped by the two bottles of good French brandy which they were taking out for medicinal purposes. These could not be thrown across with the other parcels, but would have to be carried on their persons as they wriggled through the barbed wires across the drift of the Aapies River.
In some districts, where the destruction of farms had not yet been completed, the commando found a sufficient supply of fresh fruit and vegetables and were in no immediate danger of the dread disease, but in the neighbourhood of the towns there was nothing more to be done in the way of devastation, and the only fresh food they got was what they took from the enemy. As an instance of the thoroughness of the system of destruction, Naudé related how he and his corps of hungry men had one day come upon a kraal containing the bodies of over 500 sheep in an advanced stage of decomposition, with their throats cut or their heads cleft in two by swords. Too far away from towns or camps to be driven to some place where they could have been kept for the use of starving and suffering humanity, they had been slaughtered and left to rot—anything to prevent their falling into the hands of the Boer commandos.