f them where he had been
hit.

CHRISTMAS IN HOSPITAL.

IMPERIAL YEOMANRY HOSPITAL,
PRETORIA.
_Monday, December 24th, 1900._

Here's to the doc's an' the nusses,
The bloomin' ord'lies too,
Who tend to us poor worn cusses,
All of 'em good and true.
Fightin' with death unceasin',
With ne'er a word of brag,
Sorrow an' anguish easin',
Under the Red Cross flag.

_Extract from forthcoming "Orspital Odes."_

Christmas Eve! Forsooth! And it falls on a homesick British Army in
South Africa, home-yearning and longing for a sight of the sea (our
sea!) like the famous Grecian host of old. If you ask a British
soldier, "How goes it?" he promptly growls, "Feddup." I wonder what the
Grecian warrior's equivalent for "fed up" was. He had one I am sure.

Christmas Eve, forsooth! Where is the prickly, red-berried holly? Where,
too, the mistletoe with its pearly berries? And where, most of all,
queries your enforced member of a Blue Ribbon Army--where is the Wassail
Bowl?

The weather is fine, and under our tents we don't feel the heat of the
sun. After the monotony of khaki here, there and everywhere, to which
one gets accustomed on the veldt, the colours one sees here are quite
enlivening. To begin with, _place aux dames_ the nurses are arrayed in
grey, white and red, and the patients who arrive in torn, worn, dirty or
bloody khaki, surrender all their warlike habiliments to an orderly,
have a bath and then "blossom in purple and red"--pyjamas, or in pinks,
stripes or spots.

The food is very good here, and, as Tommy says, there is _bags_ of it.
"Bags" is the great Army word for abundance. It is used apparently
without discrimination, and so one hears of bags of jam, bags of beer,
bags of bags, bags of fun, or anything else in or out of reason.

For a student of dialect this hospital opens a large field. It is a
regular Babel at times, our Sister speaking a superior Irish and the
orderly an inferior brogue. In our tent are a Scotch, two Welsh, a
Dorset and a Sussex Yeoman. In the next tent are some regulars of the
Northumberland Fusiliers and Yorkshire Light Infantry, and a true-bred
cockney Hussar, and their speech requires careful attention if the
listener wishes to understand it, I can assure you. A few Kaffirs
talking a bastard Dutch and an old Harrovian, who stutters like an