Thursday, December 20th. A friend, of the Fife Yeomanry, came in here wounded last night. He went up with twenty other men of his crowd to reinforce the Northumberlands on the hill. Out of these, six were killed and nine wounded. I have already told you many of the dead and wounded were left on the kopjes for several days. He tells me it was horrible to see some of the poor fellows; the flies had got on their wounds. One fellow with a wounded jaw had maggots inside as well as out, and they were taken out of his mouth with little bits of stick. Another with a wounded side was quite a heaving, moving mass of them where he had been hit. CHRISTMAS IN HOSPITAL. IMPERIAL YEOMANRY HOSPITAL, PRETORIA. _Monday, December 24th, 1900._ Here's to the doc's an' the nusses, The bloomin' ord'lies too, Who tend to us poor worn cusses, All of 'em good and true. Fightin' with death unceasin', With ne'er a word of brag, Sorrow an' anguish easin', Under the Red Cross flag. _Extract from forthcoming "Orspital Odes."_ Christmas Eve! Forsooth! And it falls on a homesick British Army in South Africa, home-yearning and longing for a sight of the sea (our sea!) like the famous Grecian host of old. If you ask a British soldier, "How goes it?" he promptly growls, "Feddup." I wonder what the Grecian warrior's equivalent for "fed up" was. He had one I am sure. Christmas Eve, forsooth! Where is the prickly, red-berried holly? Where, too, the mistletoe with its pearly berries? And where, most of all, queries your enforced member of a Blue Ribbon Army--where is the Wassail Bowl? The weather is fine, and under our tents we don't feel the heat of the sun. After the monotony of khaki here, there and everywhere, to which one gets accustomed on the veldt, the colours one sees here are quite enlivening. To begin with, _place aux dames_ the nurses are arrayed in grey, white and red, and the patients who arrive in torn, worn, dirty or bloody khaki, surrender all their warlike habiliments to an orderly, have a bath and then "blossom in purple and red"--pyjamas, or in pinks, stripes or spots. The food is very good here, and, as Tommy says, there is _bags_ of it. "Bags" is the great Army word for abundance. It is used apparently without discrimination, and so one hears of bags of jam, bags of beer, bags of bags, bags of fun, or anything else in or out of reason.