If the British common soldier is properly led, and if he has full confidence in his leaders, he will go anywhere; but he must be led, for he has no initiative and does not think for himself in the field any more than he does at home. What would an American soldier think of a special privilege created in a regiment because there came a time when all the officers were killed or wounded, and the non-commissioned officers took the regiment through the fight? There is an English regiment in which the non-commissioned officers all wear their sashes over the same shoulder as do the commissioned officers, because in a long-ago battle they led the regiment when their superiors were put out of action. In the American army this would have been done by the non-commissioned officers as a matter of course, or by privates if the sergeants and corporals were disabled; and in the terrible slaughters of the Civil War more than once this happened, demonstrating the resourcefulness of the American soldier. While talking with British prisoners taken by the Boers, I asked them why they surrendered so soon, when they had ammunition left and when so few had been hit. Some of them said that it was much better to be a prisoner than it was to be dead, and seemed to take it more as a joke on the rest of the army that still had to fight while they were now in safety. Some of them blamed their officers. But not one seemed to feel that it was at all incumbent upon the privates to fight it out alone or to take the lead when there was no officer near. In all the months of imprisonment in Pretoria and in the vicinity, the soldiers did not make any attempt to escape, although there were enough of them to have taken Pretoria empty-handed. There were several thousand British soldiers in one field enclosed in wire, yet they made no effort to regain their liberty. The reason undoubtedly was that they had no leaders with them. In such an attempt some of them, of course, would have been killed, and possibly a great many of them; but there is no doubt that with the proper spirit an escape could have been made. The care of the dead is a problem to which the British government has not given much attention. Certainly there is nothing in the field that would indicate that it had been seriously considered. But in this act of grace the American War Department maintains a system which is in the highest degree praiseworthy and which commands the deference of the world.