So far we only really hold the ground on which our armies stand.  If I were to walk out from this tent a mile or two over the hills yonder, I should probably be shot.  Kronstadt has been ours for four months.  It is on the main railway.  The country all round is being repeatedly crossed by our troops.  Yet an Englishman would not be safe for a minute out of range of those guns on the hill.

There is a delightful feeling of spring in the air.  We have had some warm, heavy rains lately.  The veldt grass, till now dry and dusty and almost white, is beginning to push up tiny green blades, and the green colour is beginning to spread almost imperceptibly over the distant hills.  I begin to feel a sort of kindred impulse in myself.  The old lethargy, bred of the dull, monotonous marches over the dreary plains, is passing, and I begin to cock an attentive eye at the signs of awakening, and feel that I am waking up myself.  If you could see the view from here, the barren expanse of veldt stretching miles away, the cluster of tin roofs and the few leafless thorn-trees beyond, I have no doubt you would laugh at this fancy of a spring day.  And yet I am sure I can feel it; there is a change in the air.  It has grown elastic and feels alive, and there is a smell in it to my mind of earth and vegetables.  Yesterday, when I toddled in as far as the village, I saw a little fruit tree in a garden that carried white starry blossoms at the ends of its black twigs.  It gave me quite a thrill.  Oh, to be in England now that April—­Dear me!  I was forgetting ’tis autumn, and partridges and stubble fields with you.

The Hospital Commission of Inquiry has just turned up here, very dignified and grand in a train of half-a-dozen saloon carriages, which must be a great nuisance on the overworked lines.  I have had several talks with the R.A.M.C. officers and men here about the alleged neglect and deficiencies, especially with the second in command, a very candid, liberal-minded man.  He quite admits the shortcomings.  The service is under-manned.  There are not enough medical officers and not enough orderlies.  This hospital, for instance, is entitled to a full colonel and two lieutenant-colonels, instead of which it has only one lieutenant-colonel, and the same proportion is preserved in the lower grades.  Men in all departments are stinted, and the hospitals are all seriously short-handed.  They have done their best to make up the deficiency with volunteers and civilian doctors and surgeons, but it is only partly made up.  Their numbers compare very unfavourably with the numbers allotted to other nations’ hospitals in the field.  This has all been represented to the War Office many times of late years without result.