=The March to Paardeberg.=

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Feb. 17, 1900, the Guards had been suddenly ordered to follow the cavalry from Modder River.  At the mess that evening the chaplains had been positively assured by the officers present that there would be no move until Wednesday at the earliest.  Little they knew what was in the mind of the great general!  But late at night the summons came, and within two hours the whole brigade of Guards, suddenly roused out of sleep and called in from outpost duty, were marching out into the darkness.  Whither they did not know.  They took with them neither blanket nor overcoat, but, as their chaplain says, ‘only an ample store of pluck and smokeless powder.’  They did not stop till they had covered about twenty miles, and before their destination was reached hardly a man of them fell out.  They too were part of the great movement—­a movement that would continue until they marched into Bloemfontein with Lord Roberts.

=The Chaplains on the March.=

The chaplains were not allowed to accompany them.  They followed with the doctors and the baggage.  Whether they were considered impedimenta or not they hardly knew.  Certainly their work was over for a short time, to be renewed all too soon when the first batch of wounded came down from the ever-advancing front.

So the senior Church of England chaplain and the senior Wesleyan chaplain trudged off side by side, and marched steadily through the night until, about sunrise, they set foot for the first time since they had landed in South Africa on hostile soil.  A few miles further on they passed a deserted Boer camp, and among the debris strewing the floor of a farm-house found two English Bibles.

About nine o’clock in the morning Jacobsdal was reached.  In England it would be called a village, for it had only seven hundred inhabitants; but it was quite an important town in those parts.

Here a halt was called and a few hours’ rest permitted.  Mr. Lowry climbed into a captured Boer ambulance, and found lying on the floor of it a Dutch Reformed minister, the Rev. T.N.  Fick, who had been General Cronje’s chaplain, and who only the night before had joined in the general flight from Magersfontein.  These two, both ministers of the Gospel, had been for two months on different sides of the famous kopje.  One had been praying for the success of the Boer arms and the other for the success of the English!  And yet here they lay side by side in amicable Christian converse.  Strange are the ways of war!

But though the chaplains were denied the privilege of proceeding to the front with the soldiers, two Christian workers at any rate—­we have not heard of more—­managed to secure that privilege.  By the kindness of Lord Methuen, and as a token of his appreciation of their efforts for the men, Mr. Percy Huskisson and Mr. Darroll, of the South African General Mission, were attached to the Bearer Company