To be carried off captive after the first hot skirmish into which one has gone full of confidence and hope is a trying experience for any soldier, and especially for those who are conscious of having done manful deeds deserving a better fate. In these circumstances, however, it implies no humiliation, but only a feeling of rebellious resentment against the fortunes of war that have, at one fell stroke, swept away all hopes of further distinction, dashed every ambitious plan, and severed for a time at least all pleasant associations with comrades whose friendship is never so truly appreciated under other conditions as it is amid the rough campaigning experiences that try the temper and the mettle of all men. The full sense of everything that has been lost comes upon war-prisoners in the first hours of their captivity with the crushing force of a hopeless defeat, so that they cannot even find it in their hearts to be thankful for the lives that have been spared to them. If this is so in the case of men to whom loss of liberty means no reproach and who have the proud consciousness that they did not purchase safety by unfaithfulness to their trust, how much sharper must the sting be to those who by pusillanimous surrender have brought the dark shadow of dishonour on themselves and stained the proud blazonry of regimental distinctions! Happily, British soldiers have not often gone into captivity with that stigma resting on them; and, though critics at home were ungenerously prone to assume that the ‘flag of shame’ had been hoisted too readily in some fights against the Boers, they would have told a different story if it had been their lot to lie on the bare veldt within rifle-range of hidden enemies under whose deadly fire it is even more dangerous to go back than to go forward. The idea of wresting victory by a rush or wriggling up to it through zone after zone of hailing bullets across four or five hundred yards of open ground could only have commended itself to tacticians comfortably ensconced in arm-chairs far from the buzz and boom of war. Hemmed in by a girdle of fire that cannot possibly be broken by a charge across such distances, men must either lie down like sheep to be slaughtered, or walk to their deaths with eyes open, making useless sacrifices, or surrender; and none but a braggart who had never been under fire would dare to hurl the poisoned arrows of reproach at brave men upon whom the last alternative has been forced. Every soldier knows how unjust is that journalistic phrase ‘an easy surrender.’ Nobody could have written it if he had thought for a moment of the bitterness that is in the hearts of men who have to yield under the white flag; yet it is not necessarily an emblem of shame for all that. Lumsden’s Horse did not hoist it in their direst extremity, but they would be the last to jeer at men who have passed through such an ordeal. If ever captives had the right to hold up their