After the first few weeks the whole idea of war becomes a dread, and the one thought is, When shall we go home? After a few months have passed, a helpless, “don’t care” feeling settles over every one, and after that any change is highly welcome, no matter whether it be home, the hospital, or the trench. The tedium of war is more telling upon the volunteer than upon the regular, as the former soon begins to think of his interests at home that are perhaps suffering. The volunteer never thinks that his services will be needed more than two or three months at the most; and when the service drags well on toward a year, it becomes almost unbearable. The regular does not mind it so much, for his apprenticeship of worry has been served with the early months of the first enlistment, and any change from barrack life is an agreeable one. [Illustration: Dangebhoy hospital cart used in South Africa.] After a soldier has been in the field for a few months there is not much of the military appearance left to him except his gun, and there is not the slightest trace of the smart, well-kept man on home duty. It does not matter about his appearance, however, for the man himself is there, and of all sorts and conditions of men in all creation, the true fighting man is the manliest. He works day after day like a galley slave, endangers his life night and day, and yet he is but the tiniest portion of a great machine, of whom no one has ever heard, and who will be forgotten before the ink is dry on the treaty of peace. For a day he may be carried on the shoulders of a victory-maddened crowd, and compelled to drink rare wine from silver goblets; nothing is then good enough for him--the victor. But let him ask a favor from sovereign or subject, from Congress or people, a year after, and no one remembers him. His days and nights in the field, suffering that the nation’s honor may live, are all forgotten, and the fighting man is pushed to one side to make room for the trade of peace that this same man has made possible. No honor is too great to render to the men who go out to fight, whether they be regulars or volunteers. The wage they receive would not pay any man at home to undertake half so hazardous a task. Within two years I have had the opportunity of seeing the work of four different armies in the field, fighting for what they thought was right. Among those four--Spaniards, British, Boers, and Americans--can be found a curious variety of methods of warfare, and there is much that has never been told.