Then came the Boer War. Bruce and Mrs. Bruce found themselves besieged in Ladysmith with nine thousand other Englishmen. There were thirty medical officers in the garrison--but not one surgeon. With each whine and burst of the shells from the Boer’s “Long Tom” the rows of the wounded grew--there were moanings, and a horrid stench from legs that should be amputated.... “Think of it! Not one of those medicoes could handle a knife! Myself, I was only a laboratory man,” said Bruce, “but I had cut up plenty of dogs and guinea-pigs and monkeys--so why not soldiers? There was one chap with a bashed-up knee ... well, they chloroformed him, and while they were at that, I sat in the next room reading Treve’s Surgery on how to take out a knee-joint. Then I went in and did it--we saved his leg.” So Bruce became Chief Surgeon, and fought and starved, nearly to death, with the rest. What a boy that Bruce was! In 1924 in Toronto, in a hospital as he lay propped up, a battered bronchitic giant, telling me this story, his bright eye belied his skin wrinkled and the color of old parchment--and there was no doubt he was as proud of his slapdash surgery and his sulky battles with the authorities, as of any of his discoveries in microbe hunting. He chuckled through phlegm that gurgled deep in his ancient air-tubes: “Those red-tape fellows--I always had to fight their red-tape--until at last I got too str-r-rong for them!” V Presently, two years after Ladysmith, he became stronger than they--and they came asking him to hunt microbes.... For death was abroad on the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza, in Central Africa, on the Equator. It crept, it jumped, it kept popping up in new villages, it was in a way a very merciful death--though slow--for it was without pain, turning from a fitful fever into an unconquerable laziness strange to see in the busy natives of the lake shore; it passed, this death, from lethargy into a ridiculous sleepiness that made the mouths of the negroes fall open while they ate; it went at last from such a drowsiness into a delicious coma--no waking from this!--and into a horrible unnatural coldness that merged with the chill of the grave. Such was the African sleeping sickness. In a few years it had killed hundreds of thousands of the people of Uganda, it had sent brave missionaries to meet their God, and English colonial administrators home to their final slumber. It was turning the most generous soil on earth back into an unproductive preserve for giraffes and hyenas. The British Colonial Office was alarmed; shareholders began to fear for their dividends; natives--those who were left--began to leave their villages of shaggy, high-pitched, thatch-roofed huts. And the scientists and doctors?