they are not lethal to man, they take a heavy toll of horses, mules, and
cattle. Through the night watches, droves of horses, remounts for
Brits's and Vandeventer's Brigades, cattle for our food and for the
transport, mules and donkeys, pass this way. Fine sleek animals that
have left the Union scarcely a month before, carefully washed in
paraffin in a vain attempt to protect them from flies and ticks. But
what a change in a short six weeks. The coat that was so sleek now is
staring, the eye quite bloodless, the swelling below the stomach that
tells its own story; wasting, incredible. Soon these poor beasts are
discarded, and line the roads with dull eyes and heavy hanging heads. We
may not shoot, for firing alarms our outposts and discloses our
position. To-night the lions and hyaenas that this war has provided with
such sumptuous repasts will ring down the curtain. A horse's scream in
the bush at night, the lowing of a frightened steer, a rustling of
bushes, and these poor derelicts, half eaten by the morning, meet the
indifferent gaze of the next convoy. More merciful than man are the
scavengers of the forest. They, at least, waste no time at the end.
Strange that the little donkeys should alone for a time at least escape
the fly; it is their soft thick coats that defeats the searching
proboscis. But after rain or the fording of a river their protecting
coats get parted by the moisture, and the fly can find his mark in the
skin. So the donkey and the Somali mule that generations of fly have
rendered tolerant to the trypanosome are the most reliable of our beasts
of burden. Soon, these too will go in the approaching rainy season, and
then we shall fall back on the one universal beast of burden, the native
carriers. Thousands of these are now being collected to march with their
head loads at the heels of our advancing columns. The veterinary service
is helpless with fly-struck animals. One may say with truth that the
commonest and most frequently prescribed veterinary medicine is the
revolver. Certainly it is the most merciful. Large doses of arsenic may