lars were England's best
citadels; and that the beer trade in general was the very backbone of
England's stability. It was horribly tantalising to the men in face of
such teaching to find that there had been placed on board for them not
so much as a solitary barrel of this much belauded beverage. Through
all the voyage every man remained perforce a total abstainer. Yet
there was not a single death among those sixteen hundred, nor a
solitary instance of serious sickness. What does Burton say to that?

As at sea, so on land, the authorities seemed more afraid of the
beloved beer barrel than of the bullets of the Boers; and for the most
part no countersign sufficed to secure for it admittance to our camps.
An occasional tot of rum was distributed among the men; but even that
seemed to be rather to satisfy a sentiment than to serve any really
useful purpose. At any rate, some of the men, like myself, tramped all
the way to Koomati Poort, often in the worst of weather, without
taking a single tot, and were none the worse for so refraining, but
rather so much the better.

The effect on the character of the men was still more remarkable; and
while in Pretoria I was repeatedly assured that some who had been a
perpetual worry to their officers in beer-ridden England, on the
beerless veldt, or in the liquorless towns of the Transvaal, speedily
took rank among the most reliable men in all their regiment. To my
colleague, the Rev. W. Burgess, a major of the Yorkshires, said
"Nineteen-twentieths of the crime in the British army is due to drink.
As a proof I have been at this outpost with 150 men for six weeks,
where we have absolutely no drink, and there have been only two minor
cases brought before me. There is no insubordination whatever, and if
you do away with drink you have in the British army an ideal army.
Whether or not men can be made sober by Act of Parliament, clearly
they can by martial law!"

With the men so sober, with a field-marshal so God-fearing, the
constant outrages ascribed to them by slander-loving Englishmen at
home, become a moral impossibility; and to that fact, after we had
been long in possession of Pretoria, the principal minister of the
Dutch Reformed Church in the Transvaal bore ready witness in the
following letter sent by him to the Military Governor of Pretoria:--

Not a single instance of criminal assault or rape by
non-commissioned officers or men of the British army on Boer
wom