China -- History -- Boxer Rebellion, 1899-1901; South African War, 1899-1902
Hot, sweating, dusty, and tired, with no inclination whatever to move
out of camp, everybody would find all the indications of approaching
disease every day if he were only to think of such a thing. The
reading of a liver advertisement in one of the home papers would show
all your symptoms, only they all would be "more so." But every one
knew it was only the climate, the hard work, and sometimes the
indifferent food, and so went on; but a day comes when the food
becomes absolutely distasteful, when the appetite begins to go. A long
day's riding on the veldt should leave one with a voracious appetite
for dinner, but when one comes in and can taste nothing, and only
just lies down dog-tired day after day, then he begins to think there
is something wrong. The idea of going to the doctor is very
distasteful, so he struggles on, hoping to work it off, until one day
he comes very near a collapse, with head swimming and knees groggy,
and then some comrade makes the doctor have a look at him, and his
temperature is perhaps 102 to 104. In Ladysmith it was then a question
of being sent out to Intombi Camp. To most men this seemed like being
exiled to Siberia; but there was no help for it. Comrades said
good-bye when it would have been more cheering to have said _au
revoir_. The train left for Intombi Hospital Camp at six in the
morning, carrying its load of those who had been wounded in the
previous twenty-four hours, as well as the sick. It was a sad journey
out; men could not help cursing their bad luck and wondering what
would be before them as a result of the journey, wondering if they
should ever rejoin their regiments or if their next journey would not
be back to the cemetery they were now passing on their right, growing
every day more ominously populous. The hospital camp at Intombi was a
collection of tents and large marquees, civilian doctors attending the
Volunteers and Army doctors the Regulars. There was also a
considerable number of the inhabitants of Ladysmith, not alone women
and children, but men. Hence the reason that it got christened Camp
Funk by the inhabitants that remained in the town. Situated on the
flat of the plain, on a level with the river banks, it was by no means
an ideal situation for a fever hospital, but still it was a great
thing to be out of the way of these irregularly dropping shells and to
_know_ one was away from them. "Long Tom," on Bulwana, shook the very
ground when he fired, and, with the other guns there, often got on the
nerves of many of the patients to a trying extent, and the Boers, as a
rule, started firing at sunrise, just about the time when the poor
devil who has tossed and turned through the long hours of the hot
night in fevered restlessness now from sheer exhaustion is just
sinking into sleep, to be startled by the terrific bang above his head
and the rush of the shell, like the tearing of a yacht's mainsail, as
it speeds on its arched course towards the devoted town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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