top of the page
Mr Kipling also is among the prophets who have risen to bless the splendid organisation for dealing with the sick and wounded in South Africa evolved by the officers of the Royal Army Medical Corps. In his four letters which have been published in the Daily Mail the last on Wednesday, he gives a picture drawn with the graphic pen which probably he alone among modern living writers can command, of the journey made by one of the hospital trains from Capetown north to Modder Statioo, to bring down some of the wounded from Paardeberg. He describes how when the waggons came down from the hospitals:
"the doors of the cars drew back; orderlies went to their stretchers; the side boards were ripped out of the bunks; the cook put the last flavouriag to the big stock-pot; the sisters stood to attention, each in her ward--a doctor and a sister are responsible for half a train apiece--and the blessed morphine needles were made ready. They want rest from pain, our wounded. Food and clean sheets will often bring it, but on occasion we must help Nature."
He describes the long journey down to Wynberg, the good-humoured, even humorous, talk of the wounded, the quiet efficient work of the surgeons, and the beneficent tyranny of the sisters. But the letters should be read by everybody who take any interest in the wounded and the people who look after them.
Hospital trainsThere was no known cure for enteric fever, the treatment merely reduced the symptoms. The British army is South Africa suffered more casualties from this disease than other other army before (as far as is known) or since. Of the 13,250 deaths from disease, most were from enteric. 31,000 men had to be invalided home because of it. Among the 30,000 troops Roberts had at Bloemfontein, Dr. Conan Doyle estimated that there were between 8,000 and 9,000 cases of the disease.Farwell goes on to explain how the fever is caused by drinking-water that has been contaminated by dead animals being thrown into water-courses from which the water-carts were filled. Inoculation had recently been developed but was not compulsory and was given in one enormous dose, the result of which seems to have been almost worse than the disease. (Kipling’s verse “The Parting of the Columns? refers to Bloemfontein as Bloeming-typhoidtein).
Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes and other stories, who wrote a history of the war, had also visited Kipling in Vermont, (Charles Carrington, p. 205). However, it is not known if they met in South Africa even though Doyle was at the Langman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein (Martin Booth, The Doctor, The Detective & Arthur Conan Doyle, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997, p. 228.Kipling said that for most of February he was in and out of various hospitals in Cape Town – taking particular care that he was shown round by the Principal Medical Officer on each visit and was always told that they had everything they needed. The nurses, however, told a different story in private – they wanted pyjamas for their patients which he obtained as explained in Chapter 6 of Something of Myself, some thirty-odd years later. It emerged that the stores had ample stocks but were often reluctant to release them.See also Julian Ralph, War’s Brighter Sidefor his activities on The Friend of Bloemfonteinnewspaper, on which Kipling also worked, and Chapter Six of Carrington. See also Byron Farwell. The Great Boer War(Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1976) with excellent maps and plans:
Kipling ... turned to raising money for the Soldiers’ Families’ Fund . Of the more than two dozen poems the war inspired him to write, “The Absent-Minded Beggar? , his plea for the Fund was the most celebrated at the time.See also 'War or Battle', and 'South Africa' in 'Themes in Kipling’s Works', and Mary Hamer's notes on The Five Nations (1903), the verse collection which includes most of Kipling's South African poems.
[Farwell, p.54]
One type of character appears all through Kipling’s work. This is the resourceful young officer, military or naval, carrying heavy responsibilities with a cheerful countenance, formidable in jest or earnest. He met these young men in India and South Africa, at Portsmouth and Simonstown, in peace and war. The Infant, back from the Burmese war ... Judson .. Stalky ... The officers of the destroyer in “A Sea Dog? ( Collected Dog Stories), these are the same young men, functioning according to the circumstances in which they find themselves. They are brothers of the young veterans of “The Trade?, of whom he wrote with strong emotion in Sea Warfare. He called them children, and they cannot have liked it if they read him.
top of the page
notes on the text
 the story notes on the text
Publication ORG Volume 5, page 2249 records the first appearance of this account of a hospital train in South Africa in the London Daily Mail on 21, 23, 24 and 25 April, 1900, and in papers in Canada and the Unites States the same month. |
