WAR'S BRIGHTER SIDE

CHAPTER I
The Birth of "The Friend"

Showing how it was Fathered by a Field Marshal, sponsored by a Duke and three Lords, and given over to four certificated male nurses.

We reached Bloemfontein with men who had done extraordinary marching, fighting, and feats of exposure and privation. Some of the troops, notably the Guards, had walked more than thirty (more than forty, if I am not mistaken) miles in one of the three days' continuous marching. Many had fought at Jacobsdahl, Paardeberg, and Driefontein, not to speak of lesser actions at Waterval Drift and Poplar Grove.

During at least the last week of this almost unprecedented military performance the army had been reduced to less than half rations. We were very short of food for beasts as well as men. We had lost a large number of transport waggons, with their contents and the animals that drew them, and we had put the torch to two great hillocks of food which we could not take with us beyond Paardeberg. All our four-footed helpers were spent, hundreds of horses were ill, hundreds of bodies of others were lying along our wake upon the veldt, with flocks of glutted, yet still gluttonous, aasvogels feeding upon their flesh.

Worse, far worse than all else combined, the dreadful microbes of enteric had entered the blood of thousands of the soldiers, who had found no other water to drink than that of the pestilential Modder River which carried along and absorbed the bodies of men and horses as well as the filth of the camps of both the Boers and ourselves.

We had done as the Boers had said we never would do—as only one man of their forces (Villebois-Mareuil) had foreseen that a great general like Lord Roberts must be certain to do: we had left the railway and swept across the open veldt for one hundred miles, from Jacobsdahl and Kimberley to Bloemfontein. For warning his brusque and opinionated commander-in-chief, Cronje, that we would do this, Cronje insulted the brilliant Frenchman grossly, and bade him keep his idiotic notions to himself. But we had done it, and Cronje had lost his army and his liberty for failing to heed the warning. At Bloemfontein we came upon the steam highway once more, but to the south of Bloemfontein it was wrecked at many points, while to the northward it was in the enemy's country and control.

There was therefore nothing for us but to rest. Yet how heroically we had worked to make rest necessary! How well we had earned the right to enjoy rest if we had been of the temper to desire it! In one month under the great Field Marshal we had gone further and accomplished more than all the other British armies had done in nearly six months. We had won over the eagles of victory to perch upon our standards. We had freed Ladysmith and Kimberley, drawn the Boers away from the Cape Colony border, captured the best army and leading general of our foes, and were encamped around Bloemfontein with President Steyn's Residency in use as our headquarters.

The manner in which four of the war correspondents first learned that we were not to push on to the northward in an effort to seize the Transvaal capital, but were to halt at Bloemfontein, was most peculiar. It was so peculiar as to have led to the establishment of the first newspaper ever conducted by an army for an army on the field of battle. It was so unique an episode that this volume is published to commemorate and explain it; and I trust that no one who reads this will decide that it was not an episode worthy of an even more marked, substantial, and valuable memorial than I possess the talent to construct.