We look with longing and admiration upon such deliverance from fear when we find it in other lives. I was in Edinburgh during the South African war, just after the battle of Maegersfontein, and was staying in the house of friends. There was one little boy in the family named after Prof. Henry Drummond. I had been in the library all the afternoon, the very room in which Sir James Simpson discovered chloroform, and then had gone into the drawing-room for afternoon tea. The boy and his governess were the only other members of the household who came down. He and I fell to talking about the war. I asked him: “What do you think about the war in South Africa?”
“Well,” he said, “I did not think much about it at the beginning; I did not think about it much until a friend of mine was killed.”
“Yes,” I said, “who was the friend?”
“General Wauchope.”
He was, as you know, the commander of the Black Watch, and the Black Watch had been recruited from Edinburgh. The boy told me about the regiment and its fate, and shortly after his story was filled up by an Oxford man who had been in Edinburgh when the tidings of the battle came. He said every shop was closed, and along the streets little knots of men were gathered, and you could see the sobbing of strong men everywhere. There was scarcely a great family in Edinburgh that had not been touched. And yet, at the same time, all through the city there was a subdued sense of moral elevation, as though something had lifted the character and temper of the city. They sorrowed in what had gone out from them; but they rejoiced in the way that it had gone. That regiment had been organized as a Scotch kirk. The chaplain was the minister of the kirk. The officers constituted the kirk’s session. I believe almost every man in the regiment was a member of the kirk, and I was told that as they went down through the streets of Cork to embark for South Africa, although not under orders or restraint, the men walked with arms on one another’s shoulders, singing:
“I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,
Or to defend His cause,
Maintain the honour of His Word,
The glory of His laws.”
And when they were disembarked at Cape Town and were taking their train to go to the front, they went on board singing the old Gospel soldier’s hymn: