king at four, and having had a small bowl of
porridge and milk, arose with the other fellows who had come in with me
and the sick Inniskillings, and getting our kits, got into an ambulance
waggon for the first time. The I.Y. people sent in two ambulances and
the R.A.M.C. three open mule waggons filled with sick soldiers. We
reached Pretoria at three, and we four Yeomen were sent to the Imperial
Yeomanry Hospital, where, after once again giving in our names,
regimental numbers, ranks, regiments, service, ailments, religion, and
a hundred other items of general information, I was allotted a ward,
bed, and suit of pyjamas, and after having had a bath, got into bed and
awaited the next person desirous for my name, number, time of service,
&c. It was not long before the sister in charge of our ward appeared;
she is Irish (Sister Strohan), and naturally very kind. Our tent holds
six men, and we were all new arrivals that evening. She asked if we had
had anything to eat, and we said we had had nothing beyond a little
porridge at four in the morning. Then she commanded the orderlies to
get "these _poor_ men" bread, marmalade, cocoa, beef tea, pillows and
all sorts of things. And we "poor men" laid comfortably in our beds and
grinned at one another. She ordered us later to go to sleep, but we
could not. For myself, I had not been in a bed for so long that I
positively felt restless, and almost rolled out of bed so as to have a
comfortable "doss" on the ground (it seemed like a case of the pig
returning to its wallowing). At last I fell asleep, and once in that
state took a good deal of arousing--for night nurses and orderlies tread
more lightly than stable guards, and loose horses grazing round one's
head.

[Illustration: A friendly Boer family watching a British ambulance
waggon, full of sick & wounded, going into Pretoria.]

Thursday, December 20th. A friend, of the Fife Yeomanry, came in here
wounded last night. He went up with twenty other men of his crowd to
reinforce the Northumberlands on the hill. Out of these, six were killed
and nine wounded. I have already told you many of the dead and wounded
were left on the kopjes for several days. He tells me it was horrible to
see some of the poor fellows; the flies had got on their wounds. One
fellow with a wounded jaw had maggots inside as well as out, and they
were taken out of his mouth with little bits of stick. Another with a
wounded side was quite a heaving, moving mass o