hospital door; and the
attitude of these men who had been menacing each other's lives and now
lay stricken together was not unlike the shame-faced amity of children
who have been caught fighting, and are made to share a punishment.

And no one was more concerned and depressed by the whole business than
the brisk little General, who had been speaking almost caressingly of
his shells and shrapnel. He is surely a good soldier who fights at as
small a cost as possible, disregards that cost while he fights, and
afterwards so behaves that his enemies like to take him by the hand.

Hospitals, where so many virtues too tender for the airs of the outside
world have time to bloom, are generally attractive rather than repulsive
places, and I was on that account the more surprised to find myself
repelled by these field-hospitals. To see men lying about distorted,
impotent, disfigured by all kinds of fantastic deformities, their wounds
still new, themselves lying near the spot where they fell; and to
remember the cause of it all, and how vague that cause really was to the
men who were suffering for it; the grossness and brutality of
mutilation--here a man with lead in his bowels, there a man with his
face obliterated, one man groaning and spitting from bleeding lungs,
another, struck by a great piece of flying iron, silent under the shock
of news that his sight was gone for ever; the feeling that these men
were suffering on our account, and the realisation that every one of us
has had his share in the responsibility for the whole, makes a load that
one cannot, or should not, slough away in a moment.

VII

MAGERSFONTEIN AND KIMBERLEY

There was a train going to Kimberley with cattle and forage on the
afternoon of Thursday, February 22nd, and the stagnation of everything
except dust at Modder being complete, I jumped on the twenty-ninth truck
as the engine was taking up the slack of the couplings and was
immediately jerked forward on the newly-mended road to the north. I had
nothing with me except what I stood in and a waterproof; but as the
journey of twenty-four miles occupied four hours, and as the heavens
poured down a deluge during three hours and twenty-five minutes of the
time I was glad to have even that. The line passes beside Magersfontein
and through gaps in six ridges behind it, affording an excellent view of
the whole position. That position seemed to me practically impregnable.
To have won a way to Kimberley