There are twelve beds in this tent, and many regiments are represented among the patients; there is an Imperial Light Horse man, who has been in most of the big fights, a mercurial Argyll and Sutherland Highlander, with a witty and voluble tongue; men of the Wilts, Berks, and Yorks regiments, and in the next bed a trooper of the 18th Hussars, who was captured at Talana Hill in the first fight of the war, had spent seven months at Waterval in the barbed-wire cage which we saw, and two since at the front.  It was under his bed that the escape-tunnel was started.  He gave me an enthusiastic account of the one “crowded hour of glorious life” his squadron had had before they were captured.  They got fairly home with the steel among a party of Boers in the hills at the back of Dundee, and had a grand time; but soon after found themselves surrounded, and after a desperate fight against heavy odds the survivors had to surrender.

September 2.—­Getting very hot.  Foot slow.  The reaction has run its course, and I am getting bored.

September 4.—­Monday.—­In the evening got a cable from “London,” apparently meant for Henry (my brother), saying “How are you?” and addressed to “Hospital, Pretoria.”  Is he really here, sick or wounded?  Or is it a mistake for me, my name having been seen in a newspaper and mistaken for his?  I have heard nothing from him lately, but gather that his corps, Strathcona’s Horse, is having a good deal to do in the pursuit of Botha, Belfast way.

September 5.—­Got the mounted orderly to try and find out about Henry from the other hospitals (there are many here), but, after saying he would, he has never turned up and can’t be found.  There are moments when one is exasperated by one’s helplessness as a private soldier, dependent on the good-nature of an orderly for a thing like this.

September 6.—­Wednesday.—­A man came in yesterday who had been a prisoner of De Wet for seven weeks, having been released at Warm Baths the day I left.  He said De Wet had left that force a week before, taking three hundred men, and had gone south for his latest raid.  He thought that De Wet himself was a man of fair ability, but that the soul of all his daring enterprises was a foreigner named Theron.  This man has a picked body of thirty skilled scouts, riding on picked horses, armed only with revolvers, and ranging seven or eight miles from the main body.  De Wet always rode a white horse, and wore a covert coat.  By his side rode ex-President Steyn, unarmed.  The prisoners were fed as well as the Boers themselves, but that was badly, for they were nearly always short of food, and generally had only Kaffir corn, with occasional meat.  One day a prisoner asked a field-cornet when they were going to get something to eat.  “I don’t care if you’re a brass band,” he said, “but give us some food.”  “Well, I’m very sorry,” was the apologetic reply, “we’ve been trying for a week to get one