Hector Macdonald is a man who always amuses me.  Ordinarily he is a somewhat grim-looking individual; but when there is any fighting going on his whole manner changes, and he beams and mantles with a sort of suppressed mirth.  He comes swaggering up now as the guns are opening, looking like a man who has just been told the best story he ever heard in his life, and is still chuckling over it.  “They’re on to us again,” he bubbles out, knocking his boot with his whip in irrepressible glee.  “What! what! they’re on to us again.”  He looks round at us and grins, and seems to lick his lips as a shell goes howling overhead and bursts behind us.  His merits as a general are very much discussed, but there is one thing he does thoroughly enjoy, more than any man I know, and that is being shot at.  I suppose he would rather win a battle than lose one, but I am sure he would rather lose one than not fight at all.

Next to him, in marked contrast to his excitement, stands out the cool attentive face of “Archie” Hunter; the most popular officer, as I believe one might call him, of all the British army.  He is noted chiefly as a fighter and for his dash and gallantry.  He did all the fighting in the Egyptian campaign.  During the siege of Ladysmith it was he who planned and led the night attack which blew up the big Boer gun.  When I was coming out on the steamer the one question asked among the war correspondents, who wanted to be where the most fighting was going on, was “Where will Hunter be?” But it is probably his kindness and the deep interest he feels in all his men that makes him so universally popular.  Here is a tiny instance, perhaps not worth mentioning.  We were halted on the march for a moment, sitting about and smoking, when the General gave the word to mount, and one of the orderlies, a trooper of the Lancers, jumped up in a hurry and left his pipe behind him.  Hunter saw the filthy, precious object lying on the ground, and put it in his own pocket.  At the next halt he went up to the trooper, and with that manner of his of deliberate kindness, returned it to him.  A mere nothing, of course, but very characteristic.

He has a way of looking at you, no matter who you are, Tommy or officer or what not, with a wonderfully kind expression, as if he felt the most friendly interest in you.  And so he does; it is not a bit put on.  He does not seem to think about himself, but about the people and things round him.  Every morning he finds time to stop and ask after the horses and men of our little body, and to exchange a word with one or two of the men whom he has had occasion to notice.  Not a grain of condescension is there in him; not even a thought that he is giving them pleasure.  It is a natural impulse with him, the result of the real regard and interest he feels in every soldier that marches under him.  In action his manner, always calm, is just as calm as at any other time.  He says little; observing the most important developments or listening to the reports of orderlies from various parts of the field, more often than not without any comment at all.  Yet nothing escapes him.