Impressions of a War Correspondent | Page 5

a mark that may help to
prevent it.
Times are changed from ages past; there is no longer the mighty "shock
of arms," the pomp and panoply of glorious war. Men fall to the shrill
whisper of a bullet, the sound of which has not time to reach their ears,
fired by an invisible foe. Their death is merely the quod erat
demonstrandum of a mathematical and mechanical proposition. But
with bow and arrow, spear or battle-axe, Mauser or Lee-Metford, the
heart behind the weapon is just the same now as then. Probably faint
hearts fail now as then, just as much--shrink to a panic that falls on
them suddenly as cold mist on mountain-top; and the stout hearts wait
and endure, and perhaps do more of the waiting, and have to sweat and
swear and endure this waiting longer now than then before the
intoxicating delight of active battle finds vent for their hearts' desire,
when, under names like "duty," a monarch's voice in their souls cries

"Havoc," and lets slip the old dogs of savagery lying low in every
man's nature, until the veldt of this new land is manured, like the juicy
battlefields of old, "with carrion men groaning for burial."

II
THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
Hot, sweating, dusty, and tired, with no inclination whatever to move
out of camp, everybody would find all the indications of approaching
disease every day if he were only to think of such a thing. The reading
of a liver advertisement in one of the home papers would show all your
symptoms, only they all would be "more so." But every one knew it
was only the climate, the hard work, and sometimes the indifferent
food, and so went on; but a day comes when the food becomes
absolutely distasteful, when the appetite begins to go. A long day's
riding on the veldt should leave one with a voracious appetite for
dinner, but when one comes in and can taste nothing, and only just lies
down dog-tired day after day, then he begins to think there is
something wrong. The idea of going to the doctor is very distasteful, so
he struggles on, hoping to work it off, until one day he comes very near
a collapse, with head swimming and knees groggy, and then some
comrade makes the doctor have a look at him, and his temperature is
perhaps 102 to 104. In Ladysmith it was then a question of being sent
out to Intombi Camp. To most men this seemed like being exiled to
Siberia; but there was no help for it. Comrades said good-bye when it
would have been more cheering to have said au revoir. The train left
for Intombi Hospital Camp at six in the morning, carrying its load of
those who had been wounded in the previous twenty-four hours, as well
as the sick. It was a sad journey out; men could not help cursing their
bad luck and wondering what would be before them as a result of the
journey, wondering if they should ever rejoin their regiments or if their
next journey would not be back to the cemetery they were now passing
on their right, growing every day more ominously populous. The
hospital camp at Intombi was a collection of tents and large marquees,
civilian doctors attending the Volunteers and Army doctors the

Regulars. There was also a considerable number of the inhabitants of
Ladysmith, not alone women and children, but men. Hence the reason
that it got christened Camp Funk by the inhabitants that remained in the
town. Situated on the flat of the plain, on a level with the river banks, it
was by no means an ideal situation for a fever hospital, but still it was a
great thing to be out of the way of these irregularly dropping shells and
to know one was away from them. "Long Tom," on Bulwana, shook the
very ground when he fired, and, with the other guns there, often got on
the nerves of many of the patients to a trying extent, and the Boers, as a
rule, started firing at sunrise, just about the time when the poor devil
who has tossed and turned through the long hours of the hot night in
fevered restlessness now from sheer exhaustion is just sinking into
sleep, to be startled by the terrific bang above his head and the rush of
the shell, like the tearing of a yacht's mainsail, as it speeds on its arched
course towards the devoted town.
A curious passive fight the patient settles down to, with a fatal little
thermometer keeping score and marking the game--a sort of tug-of-war
between doctors and Disease. The ground is marked in degrees from
98.4 to 106, the former being normal temperature, the later