At the same time it is only fair to point out that stretcher-bearers who advance during an engagement and render this gallant assistance to the wounded do so entirely at their own risk and must take their chance of getting hit.  Complaints have been from time to time made, by persons who did not know the circumstances, that our stretcher-bearers have been shot by the Boers.  If this took place during an action no blame can fairly attach to the enemy, for in repelling an attack they cannot of course be expected to cease fire because stretcher-bearers show themselves in front.  The hail of bullets comes whistling along—­ispt, ispt, ispt—­and everywhere little jets of sand are spurting up.  Can we wonder if now and then a stretcher-bearer is struck down?  To put the case frankly—­he is doing a brave work, but he has no business to be where he is.  It is easy to see why the usages of war do not permit the presence of ambulance men in the firing line.  Quite apart from the serious losses incurred by so valuable a corps, advantage might be taken by an unscrupulous enemy to bring up ammunition under cover of the Red Cross.

It is no easy task in the dark or in a fading light to find the khaki-clad figures lying prone upon the brown sand.  But when the wounded are discovered the ambulance man finds out as quickly as he can the position and nature of the wound, and a “first aid” bandage or a rough splint is applied.  The sufferer is raised carefully upon a stretcher or carried off in an ambulance waggon to a “dressing-station” somewhere in the rear.  If there are not enough stretchers, or the wound is merely a slight one, the disabled soldier is borne away on a seat made of the joined hands of two bearers.  A second row of ambulance waggons is loaded from the dressing-station—­each waggon holds nine—­and goes lumbering off to the field hospital.  Here the men are laid on the ground with perhaps a waterproof sheet under them and a blanket over them.  The R.A.M.C. officers come round, select certain cases for operation, and see to the bandaging and dressing of the others.  Finally one of the ambulance trains arrives, about 120 men are packed in it and it steams off rapidly to some base hospital at Orange River, De Aar, Wynberg or Rondebosch.

Any detailed account of Lord Methuen’s battles lies outside the scope of this little volume, and the British public know already practically all that can be known about the general plan of such engagements as Belmont, Graspan and Modder River.

Belmont is an insignificant railway station lying in the middle of as dreary a bit of veldt as can well be imagined.  A clump of low kopjes run almost parallel to the railway on the right, and to ascend these hills our men had to advance over an absolutely level plain devoid of any cover save an occasional big stone or an anthill (precarious rampart!) or the still feebler shelter of a bush two feet high.  In their transverse march our men had to cross the railway, and lost considerably during the delay occasioned by cutting the wire fences on either side to clear a way for themselves and the guns.