Chapter 22 - Page 2

Australians, fireblooded and keen, the dark New-Zealanders,
with a Maori touch here and there in their features, the gallant men
of Tasmania, the gentlemen troopers of India and Ceylon, and
everywhere the wild South African irregulars with their bandoliers and
unkempt wiry horses, Rimington's men with the racoon bands, Roberts's
Horse with the black plumes, some with pink puggarees, some with
birdseye, but all of the same type, hard, rugged, and alert. The man
who could look at these splendid soldiers, and, remembering the
sacrifices of time, money, and comfort which most of them had made
before they found themselves fighting in the heart of Africa, doubt
that the spirit of the race burned now as brightly as ever, must be
devoid of judgment and sympathy. The real glories of the British race
lie in the future, not in the past. The Empire walks, and may still
walk, with an uncertain step, but with every year its tread will be
firmer, for its weakness is that of waxing youth and not of waning
age.

The greatest misfortune of the campaign, one which it was obviously
impolitic to insist upon at the time, began with the occupation of
Bloemfontein. This was the great outbreak of enteric among the
troops. For more than two months the hospitals were choked with
sick. One general hospital with five hundred beds held seventeen
hundred sick, nearly all enterics. A half field hospital with fifty
beds held three hundred and seventy cases. The total number of cases
could not have been less than six or seven thousand -- and this not of
an evanescent and easily treated complaint, but of the most persistent
and debilitating of continued fevers, the one too which requires the
most assiduous attention and careful nursing. How great was the strain
only those who had to meet it can tell. The exertions of the military
hospitals and of those others which were fitted out by private
benevolence sufficed, after a long struggle, to meet the crisis. At
Bloemfontein alone, as many as fifty men died in one day, and more
than 1,000 new graves in the cemetery testify to the severity of the
epidemic. No men in the campaign served their country more truly than
the officers and men of the medical service, nor can any one who went
through the epidemic forget the bravery and unselfishness of those
admirable nursing sisters who set the men around them a higher
standard of devotion to duty.

Enteric fever is always endemic in the country, and especially at
Bloemfontein, but there can be no doubt that this severe outbreak had
its origin in the Paardeberg water. All through the campaign, while
the machinery for curing disease was excellent, that for preventing it
was elementary or absent. If bad water can cost us more than all the
bullets