=Terrible Incidents during the Epidemic.=

Tales of horror crowd upon one; stories of men in delirium, wandering about the camp at night; stories of living men in the agonies of disease, with dead men lying on either side; stories of men themselves hardly able to crawl about, turning out of bed to nurse their comrades because there was no one else to do it.

’Why do you let ’em die?’ asked a young soldier by way of a grim joke, pointing to two dead soldiers close to him, while he himself was suffering from enteric.  ’Why don’t you look after ’em better?’

‘What can I do?  I know nothing about nursing!’ was the sad reply.

Just so!  That was the difficulty—­there was no one to prevent them dying.  How many might have been saved if such had been the case!

It is too early to tell yet in detail the story of Christian work in connection with this epidemic.  Many of the chaplains had left for the front before it broke out in its intensity, and we have as yet only fragmentary evidence as to the work done by those left upon the spot.  We have not the slightest doubt that one and all did their work with the devotion we should expect from such men.  We hear of Christian soldiers who bore splendid witness for Christ in the hospitals, and who were the means of leading their comrades to the Saviour in the midst of their sickness, and for such stories we thank God.

=Christian Work in the Fever Hospitals.=

We close this chapter with an extract from a letter from the Rev. Robert McClelland, Presbyterian Chaplain 1st battalion Cameron Highlanders, published in St. Andrew, and sent us by the courtesy of the Rev. Dr. Theodore Marshall.  It is an eloquent testimony to the value of hospital work, and gives us a glimpse of what was done at Bloemfontein:—­

’When we reached Bloemfontein we found a dozen large hospitals all as full as they could hold, and at the cemetery gate it was solemn and painful to see many funerals outside the gate waiting entrance to the house of the dead.  I was told that an Episcopal clergyman was told off at the cemetery for the sad but necessary work of Christian interment.  You will ask, why this great sickness and mortality?  The water, on the whole, is bad (sometimes absolutely vile), and our masses of soldiers are not so careful about what they eat and drink as they should be in a trying climate, scorching sun by day and white frost by night.  Dysentery and enteric fever are the worst.  Here is the minister’s noblest vocation, and we could take a dozen Father Damiens for this grand work.  When the fever runs high, or the strength gets wasted and the heart goes down, a pleasant smile, a kind word, a verse of Scripture, a brief prayer, goes a long way to revive the drooping spirits.  I record my solemn conviction that hospital work, rightly done, is by far and away the most needful and the most acceptable of the chaplain’s work.  But, of course, like the doctors at the base, we are