chant rose and fell with a swinging solemnity. There was little of
pleading or supplication in its tones; they were calling on the God of
Battles; the God of the Old Testament rather than the Preacher of the
Sermon on the Mount was He to whom they sang; and sometimes there was
a strain of almost stern demand about it that gave it more the ring of
a war-song than a prayer. Entering the door of that tent seemed like
going into another century. It could not be but luminously evident to
the onlooker that these men were calling on an unseen Power whose
actual existence was as real to their minds as that of their Mauser
rifles stacked around the tent-pole. One could not help contrasting
this obvious sincerity with the perfunctory church parade on our side,
and this religion with that of two-thirds or three-fourths of our army
of careless agnostics. Barring a very small minority, principally
Irishmen, there is no place for religion in Tommy's intellectual kit.
It has just degenerated into being an old magazine from which he draws
his swear-words--a sort of bandolier of blasphemy. It was hot in that
tent, and the sweat made the foreheads of these deep-voiced choristers
shine against the dark shadows cast behind them on the canvas. It was
curious to notice how the knees and elbows of their clothes showed
signs of wear from their favourite shooting attitude, and there were
many with buttons missing from their waistcoats that had been scraped
off by the stones on the kopjes, or with buttons of different patterns
that had evidently been sewn on by the wearers in place of those worn
off. All the Boers appear to give up shaving when on the warpath,
which adds to the wild picturesqueness of their appearance. I found
the hymns they were singing were old Dutch ones. "We keep this up
every night in camp," one of them said to me, "just the same as at
home." When they had finished, they all lit their pipes, and then I
was put through a catechism, which was the same at every camp or with
every group of Boers I met for the next week. "What did I think of the
Boers?" "Did I not expect to meet a lot of savages?" "Was I not
surprised to hear them speaking English?" And then they were
everywhere keen to learn if we appreciated the way our prisoners were
being treated in Pretoria, and equally curious to know our opinion of
how they were fighting. As I thought the siege of Ladysmith, since
they would not assault, had become dolorously monotonous, I