We are not told whether the legs so addressed at once stopped shaking, or whether they were taken still shaking into the battle.  But this we do know, that the highest type of courage is not incompatible with nervousness, and that the courage that can conquer shaking nerves, and take them all unwilling where they do not want to go, is the courage that can conquer anything.  The ‘I’ that is not afraid even when the ‘hand’ shakes, is the real man after all, and the man of exquisite nervous temperament may be an even greater hero than the man who does not know fear.

Sir Herbert Chermside had succeeded General Gatacre, who was returning home, and the column was now joining hands with General French, and coming under the superior command of Sir Leslie Rundle.  It was stern work every day, and the chaplains, like the rest, were continually under fire.  Services could not be held, but night by night the chaplains went the round of the picquets and spoke cheering words to them in their loneliness, and, day by day, in the fight and out of it, they preached Christ from man to man, ministering to the wounded, closing the eyes of the dying and burying the dead, until at last they too reached Bloemfontein and cheered the grand old British flag.

Chapter XI

BLOEMFONTEIN

‘Look, father, the sky is English,’ said a little girl as they drove home to Bloemfontein in the glowing sunset.

‘English, my dear,’ said her father, ‘what do you mean?’

‘Why,’ replied the little one, ‘it is all red, white, and blue.’

And in truth, red, white, and blue was everywhere.  The inhabitants of Bloemfontein must have exhausted the stock of every shop.  They must have ransacked old stores, and patched together material never intended for bunting.  Wherever you looked, there were the English colours.  No wonder to the imagination of the little one even the sun was greeting the victorious English, and painting the western sky red, white, and blue.

We cannot, of course, suppose that all these people who greeted the victorious British army enthusiastically were really so enthusiastic as they appeared.  But ‘nothing succeeds like success,’ and those who had cursed us yesterday, blessed us to-day.

=The Advantages of Bloemfontein.=

It is a matter for thankfulness that the town was spared the horrors of a bombardment.  It was far too beautiful to destroy.  Of late years, as money had poured into the treasury, much had been expended upon public buildings.  The Parliament Hall, for instance, had been erected at a cost of L80,000.  The Grey College was a building of which any city might be proud.  The Post Office was quite up to the average of some large provincial town in this country, and several other imposing buildings proved that the capital of the Orange Free State, though small, was ’no mean city.’