The non-combatants in this respect were scarcely less unfortunate than the bulk of their fighting comrades. A band of workers in the service of the Soldiers' Christian Association set out together from London for South Africa. There were six of them, but before the campaign was really half over only one still remained at his post. My faithful friend and helper, whom I left as army scripture reader at Orange River, after some months of devoted work was compelled to hasten home. A similar fate befell my Canadian, my Welsh, and one of my Australian colleagues. The highly esteemed Anglican chaplain to the Guards, who steadily tramped with them all the way to Pretoria and well earned his D.S.O., was forbidden by his medical advisers to proceed any further, and his successor, Canon Knox Little, whose praise as a preacher is in all the churches, found on reaching Koomati Poort that his strength was being overstrained, and so at once returned to the sacred duties of his English Canonry. Thus to many a non-combatant the medical staff was called to minister, and the veldt to provide a grave. [Sidenote: _The Nursing Sisters._] The presence of skilled lady-nurses in these Hospitals was of immense service, not merely as an aid to healing, but also as a refining and restraining influence among the men. In this direction they habitually achieved what even the appearing of a chaplain did not invariably suffice to accomplish. It was the cheering experience of Florence Nightingale repeated on a yet wider scale. In her army days oaths were greatly in fashion. The expletives of one of even the Crimean _generals_ became the jest of the camp; and when later in his career he took over the Aldershot Command, it was laughingly said "he _swore_ himself in"; which doubtless he did in a double sense. Yet men trained in habits so evil when they came into the Scutari Hospital ceased to swear and forgot to grumble. Said "The Lady with the Lamp," "Never came from one of them any word, or any look, which a gentleman would not have used, and the tears came into my eyes as I think how amid scenes of loathsome disease and death, there rose above it all the innate dignity, gentleness and chivalry of the men." Now as then there are other ministries than those of the pulpit; and hospitals in which such influences exert themselves, may well prove, in more directions than one, veritable "Houses of Healing." [Sidenote: _A Surprise Packet._]