k refused to be
stayed. It should be remembered also that all the healthy manhood of
the country was either still out on commando or in the oversea camps
provided for our prisoners of war. The men brought in as refugees were
only those who had no fight left in them--the halt, the maimed, the
blind, the sick of every sort, the bent by extreme old age, the dying.
I was startled by the specimens I saw. Here were gathered all the
frailnesses and infirmities of two Republics; and to test an
improvised camp of such a class by the standards which we rightly
apply to an average English town is as misleading as it is
mischievous.

[Sidenote: _The Grit of the Guards._]

When voyaging on _The Nubia_ with the Scots Guards they often
laughingly assured me it was the merest "walk over" that awaited us,
and so in due time we discovered it to be. But it was a walk over well
nigh the whole of South Africa, especially for these Scots. While
during the second year of the war the Grenadiers were doing excellent
work, chiefly in the northern part of Cape Colony, and the Coldstreams
were similarly employed mainly along the lines of communication in the
Orange River Colony, the Scots Guards trekked north, south, east and
west. As a mere matter of mileage but much more as a matter of
endurance they broke all previous records.

I have more than once written so warmly in praise of the daring and
endurance of these men as to make me fear my words might for that very
reason be heavily discounted. I was therefore delighted to find in
Julian Ralph's "At Pretoria" a kindred eulogy: "When I passed through
the camps of the Grenadiers, Scots, and Coldstream Guards the other
day, I thought I never saw men more wretchedly and pitifully
circumstanced. The officers are the drawing-room pets of London
society, which in large measure they rule.... Well, there they were on
the veldt looking like a lot of half drowned rats, as indeed they had
been ever since the cold season and the rains had set in. You would
not like to see a vagabond dog fare as they were doing. They had no
tents. They could get no dry wood to make fires with. They were soaked
to the bone night and day, and they stood about in mud toe-deep.
Titled and untitled alike all were in the same scrape, and all were
stoutly insisting that it didn't matter; it was all in the game."

[Sidenote: _The Irregulars._]

During this second period of the war the staying powers of the
Irregulars was no le