o move a camp--if he be
dead enough." For weeks after the Brigade passed through M'Kalamo the
air was full of stench, and the bush at night alive with lions coming
for the feast. For this is horse-sickness, the plague that strikes an
apparently healthy horse dead in his tracks, while the Boer trooper
hastily removes bridle and saddle and picks another horse from the drove
of remounts that follow after. No time to drag the body off the road; so
the huge motor lorries choose another track in the bush to avoid this
unwholesome obstruction.

Horse-sickness takes ten short days to develop after infection, and the
organism is so tiny that it passes through the finest filter and is
ultramicroscopic. That means that it is too small to be recognised by
the high power of an ordinary microscope. There was horse-sickness in
the bush meadows beside the river near Kahe. Careless troopers watered
their horses, after sundown, when the dew was on the grass and death
lurked in the evening moisture where it had been absent in the dry heat
of the afternoon.

THE WOUNDED FROM KISSAKI

Two very busy days were before us when the wounded came in from Kissaki,
so badly shaken and so pale and wan after their journey. They had been
cared for by the Field Ambulance before I got them, and by the
extraordinary excellence of the surgery paid the greatest of tributes to
the care of the surgeons in front. The German hospital there, half
finished--for our advance had been far ahead of German calculations--
fell into our hands and with it a German doctor and some nurses. The
nurses had been very kind to our men and worked well for our doctors,
but they had followed the usual German custom in this country, of being
too liberal with morphia. That this drug can become a curse is well
known, though it is, when given in reason, the greatest blessing, the
most priceless boon of war. One feels perhaps that the sisters had given
it without the surgeon's knowledge, and not entirely to give ease from
pain, but also perhaps to give rest to the ward, the quiet that would
allow these over-worked women to get some sleep themselves. It was
written on the faces of the three amputation cases that they had had too
much morphia. And as this drug robs men of their appetite, keeps them
thin, and prevents their wounds from healing, it became my unpleasant
task to break them of it. This was only to be done by hardening one's
heart, by giving bromide and stout, and i