To many and many of the dying the last sound of which they were conscious must have belonged to the clamour of war, and it was well for those who heard, or fancied they heard, above the roar of guns the shout of victory. One officer, dying in the hospital at Spearman’s, had his last moments made happy by the sound of battle. He had sunk into a state of drowsiness, and was becoming gradually unconscious. Every now and then the boom of the 4.7 gun, firing from the hill above us, would rattle through the tents, and with each shot a smile would come over his face, and he would mutter with great satisfaction, "They are getting it now." He repeated these words many times, and they were, indeed, the last he uttered. Things were evidently going better with the army in his dream than they were at that moment with the real regiments by the river.
Some most vivid suggestions of what may pass through the soldier’s mind during the actual circumstances of war were afforded by the utterances of more or less unconscious men when passing under the influence of chloroform in the operation-tent. Before they fell into the state of sleep, it was evident that the drug, with its subtle intoxicating power, brought back to the fading sense some flash of a scene which may have been real, but which was rendered lurid, spectral, and terrifying by the action of the poison. Under this condition incoherent words of command would be uttered in rapid tones, full of an agony of eagerness and haste; and cries for help would be yelled forth in what seemed to be a maniacal frenzy. Many of the actual utterances that escaped these unconscious lips, and gave glimpses of a phantom war as seen through the vapor of chloroform, were too fragmentary to be remembered, but two at least were muttered with such an emphasis of horror that I took note of them.
One of the wounded from Spion Kop had evidently engraved upon his mind the hideous scene of slaughter which the trenches on that hill presented. As he was being anæsthetised it was apparent that in his dream he was back again in the trenches, and was once more among his dead and mangled comrades. The vision of one wounded man especially haunted him and fascinated him, and at last he screamed out: "There goes that bloke again whose leg was shot away; blimy, if he ain’t crawling now!"