General Hospital, Natal,
April 1901.

Our tent has filled up now—four of us in it—so we feel rather tightly packed. One of the four is a sister who has been in India, and done some camping out, so she thinks she knows all about tents and how to live in them; we rather trade on this, and when it rains we assure her she ought to go round and slack the guy-ropes in case they should shrink with the wet and pull the pegs up, as she knows so much more about how to do it than we do; or if it comes on to blow in the night we wake her up, and offer her the hammer to go round and knock in the tent-pegs!

The wind gets up so suddenly here that we have to be careful not to leave anything about that is not tethered, or it may be miles away over the veldt before we wake up.

I now have charge of a medical line of tents, and find the work very interesting, though there are many difficulties to contend with.

The Boers seem very thick in the country round; they have captured a train with 250 horses between here and H., and the other day they took 600 head of cattle from a loyal farmer only about six miles from here, and he had to fly for protection.

Some Dragoons, who have been scouring the country for some weeks, were through here the other day, and one of their poor horses fell, exhausted, near to my tent; after a rest they got him up and went on, but soon a sergeant returned to say that he had fallen again, and they were going to shoot him, could he borrow some mules and tackle to pull his body off the path? I said, "Oh, don't shoot him—I badly want a horse, and I'll get him some gruel and brandy from the store." He said I might have him if I would look after him, or else get him shot; but when we went out we found the men had already shot the poor beast.

There are so many dead horses, mules, and oxen about that it is rather horrid walking anywhere beyond the camp, and sometimes we hear that the Boers have put a dead mule (and once we heard some dead Kaffirs) into our water supply, and it makes us rather squeamish, as we can't even get our drinking water boiled here. Some of the officer patients tell us that they have drunk nothing but boiled water all through the campaign until they came here, and now they can't get it boiled for them.

I am beginning to get papers from home, and they are much appreciated by the men, especially the six numbers of the Daily Mail that come each week; I take one to each of my tents, and then they exchange them about. Of course they are a month old, but, for all that, they are the latest news, and heaps of men from other lines congregate to hear them read.

After much trouble I have retrieved that box of cushions sent by the Queen, and they are treasures indeed; nice big feather cushions covered in red twill, and labelled "A present from the Princess of Wales." It was a little difficult to know to whom to give them, as, of course, all the men wanted one. I am trying to give them to invalids who will go home when well enough, as they will be very useful on the voyage, and the men could hardly carry them with them on trek.

We had much excitement here early this month: one morning we were awakened at 5 A.M. by the sound of big guns, and in the course of time we heard that the Boers had blown up some culverts in the night, and captured a provision train; then there was a heliograph message to say, "Heavy fighting since daybreak," and they wanted some medical officers; so two men went off with ambulances, but it seems none of our men were wounded; five or six Boers were killed, and two of their wounded were brought here: one poor chap with a shell wound of the head is not likely to live; he looked just a rough country boy in corduroys, but he has "F. J. Joubert" marked on a handkerchief, so he may be some relation of the General.

The guard of the train had a rough time, as they took away his boots, and then made him carry sacks of provisions for them up a steep kopje.

For the present, they have stopped the trains from running at night. I do think the railway men have been awfully plucky in sticking to their work, when they could never feel confident that the line was not mined.

We had orders not to go outside the camp for some days, and the C.O. went round and took notes of all the men who were fit to take a rifle if there was an attack; and of course all the men ride about armed.

We had a quiet Easter Day here. The sisters were expecting some officers of the 5th Dragoons over to tea, but they did not turn up, as they had been out all night chasing Boers.

A few days later the Boers burnt a hotel and stores at Ingogo, and some troops were hurried through here to go after them, but of course they got away.

Still a great many deaths here; the other day we had four in twenty four hours; one of those who died was a doctor whom I knew slightly (he travelled up the coast with us when we first came out). He had been practising out here, so his wife was able to come and be with him, and she stayed in our camp. The poor man had heart disease. Of course he wasn't in my line, but the sister of the officers' ward had a case in the theatre, and as he had been asking for me the Lady Superintendent asked me if I would go to sit with him if I could leave my line for a bit. I managed to be with him most of the day, and he died in the evening, and I went with his wife to the funeral the next day.

The enteric line is now full, so one of my tents has been allowed to have night orderlies, and we collect the bad cases into that.

You would be amused at a "kit inspection" here: when one is proclaimed, the excitement is great, and the orderlies, almost tearing their hair, are so distracted that if the sister has any bad cases, she must nurse them herself, or understand that they will get no attention till the inspection is over! All the ward equipment, mugs, plates, buckets, brooms, &c., has to be laid out at the tent door for the officers to count. In a hospital at home, when "stock-taking" comes, you know that anything that is worn out, or damaged, or really lost, will be replaced, and you are glad of the chance of getting things made correct; but here they assure me that things must be correct, or the orderly gets fined or punished; so, to avoid this, he resorts to strategy.

As soon as the officer (with the wardmaster and orderly in attendance) has passed one tent as correct, the things may be put away again, and then comes in the help of the patients (who fully enter into the game), the most nimble trotting off with a medicine glass to one orderly who is short of that, or a bucket to another; I have known a good broom do duty for three different lines by careful dodging about.

I find one of the senior sisters here is one who applied to me when I was choosing sisters to bring out at first; but I had many to choose from, and I made no mistake in thinking others more suited for the work! Another sister who did come out with me has recently come up here, but she has not been very well since she came, and thinks the life here is very rough, so she is trying to get an exchange.

Sisters can get away from here only by inducing others to exchange with them; and it is not easy to make any one believe that this is a desirable station. I have not tried yet, as I want to stick to it if I can (of course I can't do much, but I can make a few men more comfortable), but most of the others are trying to exchange.

Our meat chiefly consists of trek ox, and it is so tough that it is difficult to tackle; about once a week we get skinny mutton.

The bread is all right, but several times lately the butter has not arrived, and we have to do without. We buy chocolates and biscuits at the coolie store to fill up the cracks.

The other day we had in a sick convoy that had been seven days on the road, and one poor fellow was so bad with dysentery that he died an hour after they lifted him out of the ambulance; really these long days of knocking about in the ambulances seem about the worst of the hardships that the poor chaps have to put up with, especially for the very sick or the wounded. You see, most of the waggons are drawn by about sixteen mules, and sometimes they trot and sometimes they walk, but sometimes they turn really mulish and won't budge; and then, after much hauling and thrashing and shouting, they start with a great bound and go off at a gallop. They are seldom on anything that you could call a road, and are much more frequently on the rough veldt.

A man who has been badly wounded can tell you all about the day when he got knocked over—he does not care to say much about the long day in the blazing sun, when he lay thirsty where he fell before the Bearer Company came along; and then, perhaps, the dark night with frost on the ground, or rain falling; he shudders when he tells you of the groaning men who lay around him, and who gradually ceased to groan, and how he began to think the ambulance would be too late to pick him up too—but what he simply can't bear to speak about is the agony of being pitched about with a fractured bone for days in one of those waggons.

It is not so bad when the fighting is anywhere near the rail, as then the wounded are soon placed in the hospital trains, and are fairly comfortable; but the long days of travelling by waggon are terrible.

General Dartnell's column was through here the other day, and they have gone into camp about two miles from us for ten days' rest. He has about 3000 men with him, and they have about filled us up with sick, while a good many went straight on board a hospital train.

Major ——, of the Commander-in-Chief's Bodyguard, was with this column, and came over to see me; his wife was in Cape Town when I was last there, and went home on the Canada. You know how particular he is about his horses, &c., at home? He drove over to see me in a very ramshackle old Cape cart with a big horse running as a pair with a rough little Boer pony. His uniform was in rags, and we did a little stitching up for him before he returned; they are having a very rough time of it.