oadwood,
And our Soudanese Lord _should_)--
Long as the world goes round!

They _should_ have got him, and they would have got him, if they
could; but when Lord Roberts, long months after, set sail for home, he
left De Wet still in the saddle. Then Kitchener, our Soudanese Lord,
took up the running, and called on the Guards to aid him, but even
they proved unequal to the hopeless task. "One pair of heels," they
said, "can never overtake two pair of hoofs." Then our picked mounted
men monopolised the "tally-ho" to little better purpose. De Wet's guns
were captured, his convoys cut off, but him no man caught, and
possibly to this very day he is still complacently humming "Tommies
may come and Tommies may go, but I trot on for ever."

[Sidenote: _Cordua and his Conspiracy._]

The last verse of this sensational song had reference to yet another
celebrity, but of a far more unsatisfactory type. All the earlier part
of that Thursday I had spent in the second Raadsaal, attending a
court-martial on one of our prisoners of war, Lieutenant Hans Cordua,
late of the Transvaal State Artillery, who, having surrendered, was
suffered to be at large on parole. In my presence he pleaded guilty,
first to having broken his parole in violation of his solemn oath;
secondly, to having attempted to break through the British lines
disguised in British khaki, in order to communicate treasonably with
Botha; and thirdly, to having conspired with sundry others to set fire
to a certain portion of Pretoria with a view to facilitating a
simultaneous attempt to kidnap Lord Roberts and all his staff. Cordua
was with difficulty persuaded to withdraw the plea of guilty, so that
he might have the benefit of any possible flaw his counsel could
detect in the evidence; but in the end the death sentence was
pronounced, confirmed, and duly executed in the garden of Pretoria
Gaol on August 24th. It was from that court-martial I came to the
Soldiers' Home Concert, sat close behind Lord Roberts, and listened to
this song:--

Though the Boer some say is a practised thief,
Yet it certainly beggars all belief,
That he slimly should try _to steal our Chief_.
But no Hollander mobs
Shall kidnap our Bobs
Long as the world goes round!

[Sidenote: _Hospital Work in Pretoria._]

Historians tell us that the hospital arrangements in some of our
former wars were by no means free f