Beside the door, beckoning to me in a mysterious manner, was Drury, a
trooper in the South African Horse. In his eyes a suspicious light, as
he earnestly requested to be moved. "For God's sake take me away,
they're trying to poison my food; and those Germans over there are going
to shoot me to-night." This poor lad had been shot badly through the
shoulder, and only by the skill of Moffat, the surgeon from Cape Town,
had he retained what was left of his shattered arm. Now malaria, in
addition, had him in its grip, and his mental condition told me plainly
that his brain was being affected. With the greatest difficulty Sister
Elizabeth and I persuaded him to undergo the quinine transfusion into
his veins that restored him to sober sense the next day. "I really did
think those two German prisoners were going to shoot me," he said. But
the two prisoners in his ward were more afraid of him than he of them,
and their broken legs, for they had got in the way of one of our
machine-guns, precluded any movement from their beds. Our men were
extraordinarily kind to German prisoners in the ward. The Boers were
different; they were never unkind, but they ignored them completely, for
the Union of South Africa had too much to forgive in the Rebellion and
in German South-West Africa. "Now then, Fritz, there ain't no bleeding
sausage for you this morning;" and Fritz, smilingly obedient, stretched
out his hand for the cold bacon that was his breakfast. Toward the end
Sister Hildegarde was just as kind to our men as she was to her own
people, and she was highly indignant with me when I stopped the night
orderly from waking her, early one morning, when I had to transfuse a
blackwater case with salt solution. She thought, she who had had quite
enough to do the day before, that I did not call her because I thought
she did not want to get up. She felt that I was tacitly drawing a
distinction between her conduct of that morning and the self-denial of
the other night, when she and Elizabeth sat up all night and day with a
German soldier who had perforated his intestines during an attack of