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.
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