At the same time, with the men and accommodation they had, the hospitals have done their utmost.  In the base hospitals there was nothing to complain of.  At Bloemfontein there was great suffering owing to lack of medical staff, surgeons, nurses, orderlies, &c., and also owing to the lack of necessary supplies and medical comforts.  For the shortness of the staff the War Office is of course responsible, and as blaming the War Office hurts nobody, I dare say the Commission will come down on it severely.  For the shortness of supplies, this was due to the working of our line of communication, which considered the efficiency of the army a great deal, and the lives of the sick very little.  But here you come to individuals, and the matter craves careful handling.

It is no fun fighting for you people at home, because you don’t know when to clap.  The English papers’ account of Prinsloo’s surrender have just come in.  By Jupiter, for all the notice you take of it, it might be the capture of a Boer picket and a dozen men.  Here have we been marching and fighting and freezing and sweating and climbing up great Alpine mountains in the snow for weeks, and captured 4000 great ugly live Boers and all their guns and baggage, and by the god of war, you hardly take the trouble to say thank you.  This sort of thing will just suit Hunter, because his idea of bliss is to do the work and run the risk, and then somehow to evade the praise.  But he ought not to be allowed to evade it.  It is true we had no war correspondents with us, but I should have thought the bare facts would have spoken for themselves.  It was the first thing of the war and our one really big score off the Boers.  However, I shall not discuss it any more.  I am disgusted with you.  Mafeking day is about your form.

LETTER XXIV

FIGHTING AND FARM-BURNING

Frankfort, November 23, 1900.

Frankfort is one of our small garrison towns.  It exists in a perpetual state of siege, like Heilbron, Lindley, Ladybrand, Winberg, Bethlehem, and a dozen others in this neighbourhood; in fact, like all the towns held by us not on the railway.  At intervals of a month or two a column comes along bringing supplies and news from the outside world; mails, papers, parcels, clothes and kit, great quantities of regular rations, ammunition, &c., &c.  You can imagine how eagerly the little garrison, stranded for months in this aching desolation, looks for the column’s coming.  Then arise other questions.  Sometimes a part of the garrison is relieved and receives orders to join the column, while some of the troops forming the column are left behind in their place.  Of course every one in the town is longing to get away, and every one in the column is dreading having to stay, and there is an interval of ghastly expectation while contradictory rumours go hurtling from village to camp and back again; and men look at each other like cannibals, every one hoping the doom will fall on some one else.  We in our corps are spared all this anxiety, and can lie on our backs and look on and condole with the unlucky ones.  We never get left anywhere.