I found time to visit the hospitals—­long barracks which before the war were full of healthy men, and are now crammed with sick and wounded.  Everything seemed beautifully arranged, and what money could buy and care provide was at the service of those who had sustained hurt in the public contention.  But for all that I left with a feeling of relief.  Grim sights and grimmer suggestions were at every corner.  Beneath a verandah a dozen wounded officers, profusely swathed in bandages, clustered in a silent brooding group.  Nurses waited quietly by shut doors that none might disturb more serious cases.  Doctors hurried with solemn faces from one building to another.  Here and there men pushed stretchers on rubber-tyred wheels about the paths, stretchers on which motionless forms lay shrouded in blankets.  One, concerning whom I asked, had just had part of his skull trepanned:  another had suffered amputation.  And all this pruning and patching up of broken men to win them a few more years of crippled life caught one’s throat like the penetrating smell of the iodoform.  Nor was I sorry to hasten away by the night mail northwards to the camps.  It was still dark as we passed Estcourt, but morning had broken when the train reached Frere, and I got out and walked along the line inquiring for my tent, and found it pitched by the side of the very same cutting down which I had fled for my life from the Boer marksmen, and only fifty yards from the spot on which I had surrendered myself prisoner.  So after much trouble and adventure I came safely home again to the wars.  Six weeks had passed since the armoured train had been destroyed.  Many changes had taken place.  The hills which I had last seen black with the figures of the Boer riflemen were crowned with British pickets.  The valley in which we had lain exposed to their artillery fire was crowded with the white tents of a numerous army.  In the hollows and on the middle slopes canvas villages gleamed like patches of snowdrops.  The iron bridge across the Blue Krantz River lay in a tangle of crimson-painted wreckage across the bottom of the ravine, and the railway ran over an unpretentious but substantial wooden structure.  All along the line near the station fresh sidings had been built, and many trains concerned in the business of supply occupied them.  When I had last looked on the landscape it meant fierce and overpowering danger, with the enemy on all sides.  Now I was in the midst of a friendly host.  But though much was altered some things remained the same.  The Boers still held Colenso.  Their forces still occupied the free soil of Natal.  It was true that thousands of troops had arrived to make all efforts to change the situation.  It was true that the British Army had even advanced ten miles.  But Ladysmith was still locked in the strong grip of the invader, and as I listened I heard the distant booming of the same bombardment which I had heard two months before, and which all the time I was wandering had been remorselessly maintained and patiently borne.