LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE EDITORS AT WORK _Frontispiece_ JULIAN RALPH _Facing page_ 42 A CORRECTED "PROOF" BY RUDYARD KIPLING " " 99 EARL ROBERTS " " 112 MISS BLOEMFONTEIN " " 160 MENU OF A NOTABLE DINNER " " 202 JULIAN RALPH AND HIS HORSE "RATTLESNAKE" " " 238 LORD STANLEY AT WORK AS CENSOR " " 268 A PAGE OF CONAN DOYLE'S "COPY" " " 306 THE CAPITULATION OF BLOEMFONTEIN " " 320 THE FRONT PAGE OF "THE FRIEND" OF APRIL 14, 1900 " " 388 WAR'S BRIGHTER SIDE CHAPTER I THE BIRTH OF "THE FRIEND" _Showing how it was Fathered by a Field Marshal, sponsored by a Duke and three Lords, and given over to four certificated male nurses._ We reached Bloemfontein with men who had done extraordinary marching, fighting, and feats of exposure and privation. Some of the troops, notably the Guards, had walked more than thirty (more than forty, if I am not mistaken) miles in one of the three days' continuous marching. Many had fought at Jacobsdahl, Paardeberg, and Driefontein, not to speak of lesser actions at Waterval Drift and Poplar Grove. During at least the last week of this almost unprecedented military performance the army had been reduced to less than half rations. We were very short of food for beasts as well as men. We had lost a large number of transport waggons, with their contents and the animals that drew them, and we had put the torch to two great hillocks of food which we could not take with us beyond Paardeberg. All our four-footed helpers were spent, hundreds of horses were ill, hundreds of bodies of others were lying along our wake upon the veldt, with flocks of glutted, yet still gluttonous, aasvogels feeding upon their flesh. Worse, far worse than all else combined, the dreadful microbes of enteric had entered the blood of thousands of the soldiers, who had found no other water to drink than that of the pestilential Modder River which carried along and absorbed the bodies of men and horses as well as the filth of the camps of both the Boers and ourselves.