The streets of the little Dutch town formed during this interval a curious object-lesson in the resources of the Empire.  All the scattered Anglo-Celtic races had sent their best blood to fight for the common cause.  Peace is the great solvent, as war is the powerful unifier.  For the British as for the German Empire much virtue had come from the stress and strain of battle.  To stand in the market square of Bloemfontein and to see the warrior types around you was to be assured of the future of the race.  The middle-sized, square-set, weather-tanned, straw-bearded British regulars crowded the footpaths.  There also one might see the hard-faced Canadians, the loose-limbed dashing Australians, fireblooded and keen, the dark New Zealanders, with a Maori touch here and there in their features, the gallant men of Tasmania, the gentlemen troopers of India and Ceylon, and everywhere the wild South African irregulars with their bandoliers and unkempt wiry horses, Rimington’s men with the racoon bands, Roberts’s Horse with the black plumes, some with pink puggarees, some with birdseye, but all of the same type, hard, rugged, and alert.  The man who could look at these splendid soldiers, and, remembering the sacrifices of time, money, and comfort which most of them had made before they found themselves fighting in the heart of Africa, doubt that the spirit of the race burned now as brightly as ever, must be devoid of judgment and sympathy.  The real glories of the British race lie in the future, not in the past.  The Empire walks, and may still walk, with an uncertain step, but with every year its tread will be firmer, for its weakness is that of waxing youth and not of waning age.

The greatest misfortune of the campaign, one which it was obviously impolitic to insist upon at the time, began with the occupation of Bloemfontein.  This was the great outbreak of enteric among the troops.  For more than two months the hospitals were choked with sick.  One general hospital with five hundred beds held seventeen hundred sick, nearly all enterics.  A half field hospital with fifty beds held three hundred and seventy cases.  The total number of cases could not have been less than six or seven thousand—­and this not of an evanescent and easily treated complaint, but of the most persistent and debilitating of continued fevers, the one too which requires the most assiduous attention and careful nursing.  How great was the strain only those who had to meet it can tell.  The exertions of the military hospitals and of those others which were fitted out by private benevolence sufficed, after a long struggle, to meet the crisis.  At Bloemfontein alone, as many as fifty men died in one day, and more than 1000 new graves in the cemetery testify to the severity of the epidemic.  No men in the campaign served their country more truly than the officers and men of the medical service, nor can any one who went through the epidemic forget the bravery and unselfishness of those admirable nursing sisters who set the men around them a higher standard of devotion to duty.