Saturday was a day of truce, but at sundown on Saturday not only had all the wounded to be cleared out from the field hospitals, but those hospitals themselves had to move, as, with the renewal of hostilities, they would be in a place of danger. Chieveley was therefore soon filled to overflowing.
There were three army surgeons with "No. 4" whose names I have already mentioned. They were reinforced by a small field hospital under the charge of Major Baird and Captain Begbie.
Some of the wounded came up by train, and some by ambulances or by wagons, but a very large proportion, a proportion which included nearly all the serious cases, were carried up on stretchers by hand. No mode of transport is more comfortable than this, or is less fatiguing to the patient, and the splendid organisation of volunteer bearers and of coolie carriers enabled this means of bringing up the wounded to be very largely made use of. Certainly the stretcher-bearers were the means of saving lives, and of sparing those they carried an infinite amount of pain.
As seen at night, the procession up to Chieveley was doleful and mysterious. The long line of silent men moving in clusters, each cluster with a stretcher and a body in its midst. Stealing slowly and cautiously over the veldt in the moonlight, they all made for the two white lights which swung over the hospital by the station.
The coolies carried their stretchers shoulder high, so that the body of the man they bore was lit fitfully by the moon as they passed along with absolutely noiseless feet. The coolies themselves added no little to the uncanny spectacle, for in the shadow beneath the stretcher stalked a double row of thin bare legs, and by the poles of the stretcher were the white or coloured turbans that these men affect; while here and there a sleek black head glistened in the light.
There was but one house at Chieveley--the stationmaster’s house. It had been effectually looted after the Boer fashion, but it would have done well as a resting-place for the four nurses who came up with the hospital. The house, however, had been taken possession of, and the nurses had to contemplate either a night in the open or in the waiting-room at the station. As this latter room had been used as a stable by the Boers, it was not in much request. It served, however, as a place for the depositing of personal baggage and for the preparing of such food as it was possible to prepare--chiefly, indeed, for the making of tea.