Among the wounded was Paymaster-Sergeant D.S. Fraser, well known in sporting circles in Calcutta. He had his horse shot under him, and was himself wounded in the thigh and captured by the Boers. Our ambulance went out next day and found that the Boers had buried all the dead, except Major Showers, whose body was brought back to camp and buried there. The service was a very impressive one, and was conducted by the Military Chaplain attached to the regiment camped close by. It was calculated to bring home to us all the stern realities of war. Yet in a trooper’s diary immediately after the most pathetic entry we find it recorded that when rations were to be distributed by a process of division and subdivision ‘B—— argued at great length that one-fourth of two-thirds could not be the same as two-thirds of one-fourth,’ and the discussion took a heated turn. Such are the trifles that seem important to men who have just come out of a battle in which perhaps they were more than once close to the jaws of death. ‘Linesman,’ in those brilliant impressions of the war in Natal—always truthful in fact, but not invariably just in deduction—has recorded a very similar incident at Vaal Krantz, when, from a fire that was deafening, bewildering in its intensity of concentration on the British front, some died, some were carried away on dripping stretchers before they could learn the full gamut. And the survivors? The few within the writer’s ken—quarrelled! During a lucid interval in the shelling, the regimental cooks had contrived to make and distribute tea to the men lying prone in their shelters. The distribution was not perhaps impartial. The menace of a 94-lb. shrapnel would make a liquor-measure uncertain with the eyes of a hundred Government inspectors glued upon it! So there arose a bickering. Tom down below must obviously have taken more than his share, else how came it that Mick above had to content himself with less? ‘Peace!’ yelled the monstrous shrapnel at the height of the argument; ‘Shut up!’ snapped the pom-pom shells; ‘Silence!’ boomed the far-off 40-pounder. Not a bit of it. No foreign-made projectile ever fired shall stop a Briton well under way with a grievance. That argument flourished amazingly under the shower, and only died away when the glaring sun overhead began to induce an unforgiving slumber.