and of the nine several had been temporarily
disabled by sickness or wounds. The battalion at starting was about a
thousand strong, and afterwards received various drafts amounting to
about four hundred more; but only eight hundred marched into Pretoria.
The Scots Guards, however, were so singularly fortunate as not to lose
a single officer during the whole campaign.

The non-combatants in this respect were scarcely less unfortunate than
the bulk of their fighting comrades. A band of workers in the service
of the Soldiers' Christian Association set out together from London
for South Africa. There were six of them, but before the campaign was
really half over only one still remained at his post. My faithful
friend and helper, whom I left as army scripture reader at Orange
River, after some months of devoted work was compelled to hasten home.
A similar fate befell my Canadian, my Welsh, and one of my Australian
colleagues. The highly esteemed Anglican chaplain to the Guards, who
steadily tramped with them all the way to Pretoria and well earned his
D.S.O., was forbidden by his medical advisers to proceed any further,
and his successor, Canon Knox Little, whose praise as a preacher is in
all the churches, found on reaching Koomati Poort that his strength
was being overstrained, and so at once returned to the sacred duties
of his English Canonry. Thus to many a non-combatant the medical staff
was called to minister, and the veldt to provide a grave.

[Sidenote: _The Nursing Sisters._]

The presence of skilled lady-nurses in these Hospitals was of immense
service, not merely as an aid to healing, but also as a refining and
restraining influence among the men. In this direction they habitually
achieved what even the appearing of a chaplain did not invariably
suffice to accomplish. It was the cheering experience of Florence
Nightingale repeated on a yet wider scale. In her army days oaths were
greatly in fashion. The expletives of one of even the Crimean
_generals_ became the jest of the camp; and when later in his career
he took over the Aldershot Command, it was laughingly said "he _swore_
himself in"; which doubtless he did in a double sense. Yet men trained
in habits so evil when they came into the Scutari Hospital ceased to
swear and forgot to grumble. Said "The Lady with the Lamp," "Never
came from one of them any word, or any look, which a gentleman would
not have used, and the tears came into my eyes as I think how