cold mist on mountain-top; and the stout hearts wait and
endure, and perhaps do more of the waiting, and have to sweat and
swear and endure this waiting longer now than then before the
intoxicating delight of active battle finds vent for their hearts'
desire, when, under names like "duty," a monarch's voice in their
souls cries "Havoc," and lets slip the old dogs of savagery lying low
in every man's nature, until the veldt of this new land is manured,
like the juicy battlefields of old, "with carrion men groaning for
burial."

II

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

Hot, sweating, dusty, and tired, with no inclination whatever to move
out of camp, everybody would find all the indications of approaching
disease every day if he were only to think of such a thing. The
reading of a liver advertisement in one of the home papers would show
all your symptoms, only they all would be "more so." But every one
knew it was only the climate, the hard work, and sometimes the
indifferent food, and so went on; but a day comes when the food
becomes absolutely distasteful, when the appetite begins to go. A long
day's riding on the veldt should leave one with a voracious appetite
for dinner, but when one comes in and can taste nothing, and only
just lies down dog-tired day after day, then he begins to think there
is something wrong. The idea of going to the doctor is very
distasteful, so he struggles on, hoping to work it off, until one day
he comes very near a collapse, with head swimming and knees groggy,
and then some comrade makes the doctor have a look at him, and his
temperature is perhaps 102 to 104. In Ladysmith it was then a question
of being sent out to Intombi Camp. To most men this seemed like being
exiled to Siberia; but there was no help for it. Comrades said
good-bye when it would have been more cheering to have said _au
revoir_. The train left for Intombi Hospital Camp at six in the
morning, carrying its load of those who had been wounded in the
previous twenty-four hours, as well as the sick. It was a sad journey
out; men could not help cursing their bad luck and wondering what
would be before them as a result of the journey, wondering if they
should ever rejoin their regiments or if their next journey would not
be back to the cemetery they were now passing on their right, growing
every day more ominously populous. The hospital camp at Intombi was a
collection of tents and large marquees, civilian doctors attending the
Vol