Back into the marquee into which he had been the morning rushed the chaplain.  ’Lads, I told you this morning! “Suddenly,” lads, “suddenly,” they were to be turned back “suddenly.”  It is true; my message was from God.  Buller is here!’ And then the dying roused themselves and lived, and voices were uplifted in loud thanksgiving.

And so Lord Dundonald’s Colonial troops marched into the town, to be greeted as surely men were never greeted before; to be hailed as saviours, as life-givers, as heroes.  Watch them.  They have only twenty-four hours’ rations with them, and they have had a hard, rough time themselves, but they give it all away.  How can they deny anything to these living skeletons standing around!

And what did it mean in Ladysmith?  It meant this—­at Intombi, at any rate.  When Buller’s guns sounded nearer, the poor fever-stricken patients brightened up, and roused themselves with a fresh effort for life.  When the sound of his firing receded into the distance, they just lay back and died.  His entry into Ladysmith was life from the dead.

‘=It was Time He Came=.’

It was time that he came.  Food was at famine prices.  Eggs sold at 48s. per dozen, and one egg for 5s.; a 1/4-lb. tin of tobacco sold for 65s.; chicken went for 17s. 6d. each; dripping, 1/4-lb. at 9s. 6d., and so on.  Chevril soup (horseflesh) became the greatest luxury, and was not at all bad; while trek-oxen steak might be looked at and smelled, but to eat it was almost impossible.  One of the most pathetic, and at the same time most comical, sights to be witnessed during the siege, was surely that of one enthusiastic lover of the weed, who, unable to procure any of the genuine article for himself, followed closely in the wake of an officer in more fortunate circumstances, in order that at any rate he might get the smell and have the precious smoke circle round his head.

It was time, we say, for Buller to come.  Relief came not a day too soon.  But a short time longer could the beleaguered men hold out.  But he came at last, and when next day he entered the town, bending low over his saddle, worn out with his great exertions, the sight that met his gaze was one never to be forgotten.  These men whom he had known in the greatness of their strength at Aldershot were little more than skeletons, hardly able to show their appreciation of his splendid efforts, so weak were they.

‘You should have seen the general cry,’ said a group of men from Ladysmith at the Cambridge Hospital the other day.  It was their way of putting the case.  The apparently stolid, dogged, undemonstrative Englishman broke down completely, as he gazed upon the sights around him.  And no wonder!  He had come not a moment too soon.  But he had come in time.  ‘Thank God,’ said Sir George White, ’we have kept the flag flying!’

=A Story of Devotion.=