oops of a miserable suspicion. Perhaps
the thing is well-nigh inevitable, for I know what pains Lord Roberts
took to prevent it; and it may be as well that we should recognise it as
one of the realities of war. For myself, the horrors of actual fighting
did not touch me half so nearly; I have seen men killed close to me and
been less shocked than I was by these domestic outrages. To die, for the
one who dies, is nothing; it affects him not at all; he is absent. But
here was not death, but outrage on the foundations of civilised life;
outrage upon living people, who suffer and remember.

PART IV

AN EXPEDITION WITH LORD METHUEN

XIII

IN THE FIELD AGAIN

After all, we need not have made so much haste to leave Bloemfontein. We
had been told there that a column would start for the relief of Mafeking
on March 20th, but when we arrived at Kimberley on the 18th we found
that no movement was to take place for several days. The date was
constantly shifted farther into the future, and the days of waiting had
grown into weeks before an order came that Lord Methuen with his force
of about 10,000 men was to march on Boshof. As far as information went
we lived from hand to mouth; all the orders came from Bloemfontein, and
they seldom provided for more than a day at a time. It was not
unnatural, therefore, that when an order to move did at last come we
built upon it all kinds of extravagant expectations, and it was a
cheerful army that left Kimberley on April 2nd and took the road for
Boshof.

After many days of inaction it was indeed good to recommence a moving
life among oxen and waggons and guns and soldiers. Kimberley was all
very well as a spectacle immediately after the siege; everyone flocked
to see the holes in the houses and the ruined buildings. It was all very
well (so, at any rate, we persuaded ourselves) to live in a club and to
dine again amid damask and flowers and cut glass after the rude life of
the fields; but even this was a novelty only for a day, and one soon
became impatient of the poor shift at living which dwellers in towns are
forced to make. I think I never saw a town so lost and drowned beneath
the wave of money-getting as Kimberley; even its recent privations were
turned to a nimble account, and 6-inch shells were selling at L10 apiece
before I left. The people who fled most readily from the projectiles
were of course the most eager to buy them--so highly do we esteem the
instruments