The air was delightfully cool, with a pleasant breeze from the river, and this evening ride from Hagir will remain in one's memory as one of the pleasant experiences of the campaign. The comparative novelty of our surroundings, and the certainty that now at length we were within measurable distance of the enemy, filled one with elation and banished all the petty worries of the morning. As long as one enjoyed good health, nothing could be more delightful than the simple pleasures of our open-air existence, with all its hard work and good-fellowship. But when fever or dysentery gets hold upon a man, all the glamour of the campaign fades away, and one is forced to realise all the sordid discomforts of the march. During the recent advance upon Omdurman many a case of unobtrusive heroism occurred, in which men, officers and privates alike, refused to avail themselves of the field hospitals, which would have taken them for the time being from their battalion, and preferred to march along with the rest, though their heads were racked with pain and their strength at vanishing point from fever. If a campaigner could secure from a fairy godmother or other supra-mundane agency one supreme blessing, he ought most certainly to ask for health. Yet there is one danger to which the healthy man is exposed. He finds it difficult, sometimes, to sympathise with others less fortunate than himself. To many who enjoy vigorous health there is something positively irritating in a sick man. It is a painful trait in some characters, and is a survival possibly of that terrible instinct which leads almost every species of lower animal to finish off those of their number who become sick or maimed. I have known a man who experienced this peculiar irritation in the presence of comrades who were ill, behave in the most unselfish and generous way to the same men when they were in sound health; and while he had to force himself, as it were, to show sympathy with an ailing man, he would fetch water in his helmet for a wounded donkey, and feel ready to weep at the sight of a dying horse.