(We are sure that if the men in this Army who are engaged as artists or who feel strongly and lovingly the relation of true art to war, to photography and to the refinement of mankind—if these will take the trouble to answer this letter, we shall have a rich correspondence.—Editors, Friend.)

CHAPTER XXV
The End Approaches

We arrange to retire from our posts, but still possess the enterprise to start a Portrait Gallery.

"The Friend," No. 23—actually the 25th number we had edited—contained a notice that Mr. Kipling had sailed for England on the previous day (April 11th), and we were doing our utmost to get rid of our offspring, to find some one to adopt it.

As long ago before this as when Sir Alfred Milner was with us in Bloemfontein, we had made known to him and to Lord Roberts, through Lord Stanley, that the employers of certain ones among us were complaining of our expending part of their time and our energy upon this outside work. I am certain that no interest with which any of us were connected suffered the least slight or injury, for the result of our labour of love for Lord Roberts was simply that we worked twice as hard—and learned twice as much of what was going on as those correspondents who held aloof and let the whole burden fall upon us. My employer, Mr. Harmsworth, uttered no sound of criticism or complaint, by the way, and the only word about The Friend that reached me from the Daily Mail was a cablegram wishing us success.

We were all tiring fast. I was lame with an injury which kept laying me up, and otherwise my condition was such that for weeks I had not been able to partake of any food except milk and soda water. I owe a great deal for moral and physical stimulus to Dr. Kellner, ex-mayor of Bloemfontein and head of the Free State Hospital, whose services to the British army should not be allowed to pass into history without his receiving some substantial honour and acknowledgment from this government. He told the noble matron, Miss Maud Young, and her nursing assistants (when they gave notice that they wished to leave at the outbreak of the war) that he "never heard before that politics had anything to do with the care of sick and wounded men," and up to that standard of duty he worked on with them as enthusiastically under the Union Jack as he had under the four-colour flag.

I did not know how ill and dispirited I was until one evening I went to the room of my assistant, Mr. Nissen, of the Daily Mail, and heard through his closed window in the Bloemfontein Hotel the sound of a banjo. It is a purely American instrument, and the plunk-plunk of its strings made my heart leap. I threw open the window and heard in nasal tones, affected by a Yankee colleague for the purpose of his song, a sentiment like this:—

Oh, I want ter go back to Noo York,
Ther "tenderloin's" ther place,
Where the men are square and the women are fair
And I know evurry face.

I want ter go back to Noo York
Ter hear Gawd's people talk.
Yer may say what yer please
Only just give ter me
My little old Noo York.

I felt like shouting, "fellow citizens, them's my sentiments." Suddenly I, too, wanted "ter go back ter Noo York"—with London as an alternative. I had not known it or felt it before, but that song, as new to me as any that will be written five years hence, touched the button that produced a nostalgia which Heaven knows I had good reason to feel without any such additional or peculiar incentive.