I did
not realize what it was like when, two or three months before I left
Johannesburg, I read in Motley's book about the war in the Netherlands
of the state of things in Leyden when the Prince of Orange burst his way
through to their rescue, and of the terrible appearance of the starved
inhabitants, but now I can quite understand how awfully bad it was. It
must have been even worse then. Here there were some rations
distributed--little enough, but some. There the people had nothing but
the weeds they gathered, and boiled down with the scraps they could pick
up. There they died in hundreds of actual starvation; it cannot have
been quite so bad here. But as we see, though there has been just enough
food to keep life together, that has been all, and it has been from
disease brought on by famine, and not by famine itself, that they have
died. Then, too, shells were always falling among them, and at any
moment they might be attacked. I expect that anxiety and fever have had
as much to do with it as hunger."
"Yes, Chris. You know, when we were grumbling sometimes at not being
employed in the fighting, we have wished we had stopped in Ladysmith,
and gone through the siege there; now, one can thank God that one did
not do so.
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