rom fault. Hence Steevens in his
"Crimean Campaign" asserts that while the camp hospitals absolutely
lacked not only candles, but medicines, wooden legs were supplied to
them from England so freely that there were finally four such legs for
every man in hospital. Clearly those wooden legs were consigned by
wooden heads. Even in this much better managed war the fever epidemic
at Bloemfontein, combined with a month of almost incessant rain,
overtaxed for a while, as we have seen, the resources and strength and
organizing skill of a most willing and fairly competent medical staff.

But Pretoria was plagued with no corresponding epidemic, and possessed
incomparably ampler supplies, which were drawn on without stint. In
addition to the Welsh, the Yeomanry, and other canvas hospitals
planted in the suburbs, the splendid Palace of Justice was
requisitioned for the use of the Irish hospital, which, like several
others, was fitted out and furnished by private munificence. The
principal school buildings were also placed at the disposal of the
medical authorities, and were promptly made serviceable with whatever
requisites the town could supply. To find suitable bedding, however,
for so vast a number of patients was a specially difficult task. All
the rugs and tablecloths the stores of the town contained were
requisitioned for this purpose; green baize and crimson baize, repp
curtains and plush, anything, everything remotely suitable, was
claimed and cut up to serve as quilts and counterpanes, with the
result that the beds looked picturesquely, if not grotesquely, gay.
One ward, into which I walked, was playfully called "The Menagerie" by
the men that occupied it, for on every bed was a showy rug, and on the
face of every rug was woven the figure of some fearsome beast, Bengal
tigers and British lions being predominant. It was in appearance a
veritable lion's den, where our men dwelt in peace like so many modern
Daniels, and found not harm but health and healing there.

[Sidenote: _The wear and tear of War._]

In this campaign the loss of life and vigour caused by sickness was
enormously larger than that accounted for by bullet wounds and
bayonets. At the Orange River, just before the Guards set out on their
long march, thirty Grenadier officers stretched their legs under their
genial colonel's "mahogany," which consisted of rough planks supported
on biscuit boxes. Of those only nine were still with us when we
reached Pretoria,