At last I got to sleep, awaking at four, and having had a small bowl of porridge and milk, arose with the other fellows who had come in with me and the sick Inniskillings, and getting our kits, got into an ambulance waggon for the first time. The I.Y. people sent in two ambulances and the R.A.M.C. three open mule waggons filled with sick soldiers. We reached Pretoria at three, and we four Yeomen were sent to the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital, where, after once again giving in our names, regimental numbers, ranks, regiments, service, ailments, religion, and a hundred other items of general information, I was allotted a ward, bed, and suit of pyjamas, and after having had a bath, got into bed and awaited the next person desirous for my name, number, time of service, &c. It was not long before the sister in charge of our ward appeared; she is Irish (Sister Strohan), and naturally very kind. Our tent holds six men, and we were all new arrivals that evening. She asked if we had had anything to eat, and we said we had had nothing beyond a little porridge at four in the morning. Then she commanded the orderlies to get "these _poor_ men" bread, marmalade, cocoa, beef tea, pillows and all sorts of things. And we "poor men" laid comfortably in our beds and grinned at one another. She ordered us later to go to sleep, but we could not. For myself, I had not been in a bed for so long that I positively felt restless, and almost rolled out of bed so as to have a comfortable "doss" on the ground (it seemed like a case of the pig returning to its wallowing). At last I fell asleep, and once in that state took a good deal of arousing--for night nurses and orderlies tread more lightly than stable guards, and loose horses grazing round one's head.
[Illustration: A friendly Boer family watching a British ambulance waggon, full of sick & wounded, going into Pretoria.]
Thursday, December 20th. A friend, of the Fife Yeomanry, came in here wounded last night. He went up with twenty other men of his crowd to reinforce the Northumberlands on the hill. Out of these, six were killed and nine wounded. I have already told you many of the dead and wounded were left on the kopjes for several days. He tells me it was horrible to see some of the poor fellows; the flies had got on their wounds. One fellow with a wounded jaw had maggots inside as well as out, and they were taken out of his mouth with little bits of stick. Another with a wounded side was quite a heaving, moving mass of them where he had been hit.