And when our noble Queen shall place upon his breast the cross which is the soldier’s diadem, their hearts will throb in unison with his, for their strong hands on that May Day helped him to win what he is so fat to wear; and when our Sovereign honours him she honours them, and well they know it.  And when the years have rolled away, and they are old and grey, and spent with wounds and toil, fit for nothing but to dandle little grand-babes on their knees, young men and maids will flock around, and pointing out the veteran to the curious stranger say, with honest pride, “He was with Towse the day he won the cross.”

THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.

There are hundreds of men lying in unmarked graves in African soil to-day who ought to be alive and well, others who have been done to death by the crass ignorance, the appalling stupidity, the damnable conceit which will brook no teaching.  I have seen men die like dogs, men who left comfortable homes in the old land to go forth to uphold the power and prestige of our nation’s flag.  I have seen them gasping out their lives like stricken sheep, just in the springtide of their manhood, when the glory and the lust of life should have been strong upon them I have watched the Irish lad with the down upon his brave boyish face pass with the last deep-drawn quivering sob over the border line of life, into the shadows of the unsearchable beyond, a wasted sacrifice upon the grim altar of incapacity.  I have seen the kilted Scottish laddie lie, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, waiting for the whisper of the wings of the Angel of Death.  I have seen the death damp gather on his unlined brow, and watched the grey pallor creep upwards from throat to temple; until my very soul, wrung with anguish unutterable, has risen in hot revolt against the crimes of the incapable.

I have knelt by England’s fair-faced sons, the child of the cities, the boy from the fens, the youth from the farm, and watched the shadows creeping over eyes that mothers loved to look upon.  I have seen the wasted fingers, grown clawlike, plucking aimlessly at the rude blankets as if weaving the woof of the winding-sheet, and have listened with aching heart to the aimless babbling of the dying, in which home and friends were blended, until the tired voice, grown aweary with the weight of utterance, died out like the crooning of a lisping child, as the soul slipped through the golden gateway that leads to the glory beyond the grave.  I have watched them pile the earth above the last home of Cambria’s sons, the gallant children of the old Welsh hills.  I have seen them laid to sleep, as harvest hands will lay the sheaves in undulating rows when the summer shower has passed; and over every shallow grave I have sent a curse for those whose brutish folly caused the flower of Britain’s army to wither in the pride of their peerless boyhood.