252

CHAPTER XV

THE END

"AN unhappy land"-no phrase or words could possibly sum up the situation of South Africa to-day better than these, none could have a deeper or sadder meaning to any one who has seen recently the bitter distraction of all the country there. It is a land drenched with the best blood of its people, and with the best of ours; a land ravaged, and wasted, and made empty; a land afflicted with the curse of the soldier from end to end. It is as a grievously sick man, who is incapable of earning his own living, and has to be supported by some one else. There is nothing there. Its industries are man killing and maiming; its exports are human lives.

Take the train at Kroonstad and journey to the Vaal. It is not very far, but you will not travel so quickly that you may not look out and see for yourself how the land lies. You will pass out of Kroonstad with a great canvas hospital upon your left. Blue-clad, miserable men will listlessly take stock of your train as it passes by. Up above the white tents,

on a little slope of open veldt, you will see rows of mounds. Perhaps the grass has grown over some of them by now. They were bare and new when the writer came by six months ago. You will run past America and Jordaan Sidings-empty voids, where nothing but a station signboard notifies the fact that they have been stopping-places for trains in some other age. You will pass over culverts and little bridges that have been blown up with dynamite, and rapidly repaired out of old sleepers and nondescript material of all kinds by that wonderfully efficient Railway Pioneer Regiment. At frequent intervals there will be twisted rails and partially burned sleepers beside the tracks-no, on second thoughts, there will be no sleepers, because the patrols will have garnered them up for fuel. Sometimes you will come across wrecked and burned railway trucks and other rollingstock.

At little stations, such as Honing Spruit, you will find all manner of curly and angular entrenchments and gun emplacements, and redoubts, and far out sangars for the outposts, and a bewildering entanglement of encircling barbed wire. And there will be harassed officers, and empty tins of bully-beef, and discontented 'Tommies,' and a demand for news.

At Roodeval you will see the row of seven graves beside the line-each one ornamented with its wooden cross, and caps and sides of nine-inch shells, and little surrounding borders of stones. And,

closer to the railway-line than usual, you will perceive the reason of this dearth of population. The windows are empty and gaping. The roof is gone. Broken pieces of furniture and household effects litter the ground in front and rear. There is nothing left. To live in such a place would not be at all comfortable. One or two will have shell-holes in the walls. If you get out of your carriage and look very closely you will be able to find little chipped holes in the white-washed mud plaster of the walls, where the bullets have struck.

if

And that is the way it is everywhere. These places along the line have been burned and destroyed in accordance with the warning Lord Roberts gave the inhabitants as to raids upon his communications. It is quite fair and legitimate, generally speaking. We must establish British rule-gently, if possible, but it must be established. Away from the line, tooyou have not seen enough to prove to you that this is 'an unhappy land'-you will find the burned and empty houses, the impoverished farms. It cannot be helped. We have tried lenient measures—a leniency which only returned to us in derision. These people are obstinate. We mean to have our way. They must be made to feel that the yoke will weigh heavily until our way is theirs also.

But it is cruel-bitterly, heartrendingly cruel!

It is not only in the gutted dwellings that you will see the cruelty and horror of it all. Go back from

the Vaal to Bloemfontein, and walk to the cemetery below the old fort and beside the barracks of the late Free State Artillery. You will find some graves of British soldiers which have been occupied since the early fifties, but you will find them vastly outnumbered by the graves of those who found a resting-place there in 1900.

Of coming from a visit to some sick comrades in the Artillery Barracks, which were then occupied by the Australian Hospital, the writer has one very vivid recollection. Walking beside the graveyard wall, we had paused to watch the burial of some officer, which was a little more noticeable than the generality of funerals for the reason that his body was enshrouded in a Union Jack instead of a brown blanket. We mounted our horses, and rode round the corner of the stone enclosure. At the gate were lying on the grass six stiff shapes, sewn tightly up in their blankets -probably the blankets they had died in. The fatigue parties within were so busy that, for a few minutes, they had not had time to come out and carry the dead men in, and the cart, probably being required to go to another hospital for a similar load, had had to deposit them outside. It was a grim reminder of the brisk business Death was doing amongst the enteric wards.

In course of time the pretty burial-ground was filled to overflowing. There were long trenches in which the dead were laid in layers. A separate grave